Transformational Operations September 2019

Wednesday, 25 September 2019

You often want to build an app as quickly as possible. To get some kind of MVP in the hands of users, giving them value and something for you to incrementally improve. Most features can come later, but if you ever intend to offer a shared editing experience of any kind, you really need to think about it up front.

At Threads Styling we were faced with such a prospect when planning their Social Story builder. Having worked with CMSs in the past, we knew the pain of managing document locks with all their edge cases. We also knew that eventually the use case will arise to concurrently edit the document, and if you haven’t planned for it, it is a monumental task.

By treating the document as a stream of JSON patch changes from the very beginning, we were able to offer real-time collaborative editing with conflict resolution smoothly handled by an Operational Transformation algorithm. In this talk, Jason will discuss the concepts involved and demonstrate a simple, but working example of a shared document using our open source library.

By Jason Green, Principal Developer at Threads Styling - Twitter: @aziraphael