Niklas Elmqvist and Boris Koldehofe
A collaborative (document) editor provides a way for many users to share and
work on the same document in real-time. Unlike sequential editors the purpose
of a collaborative editor is to support the users in working
together on a common task by modifying a common document concurrently.
The implementation of a collaborative editor requires to consider
both technical and social issues with respect to how users communicate
in such an environment.Existing approaches use a central server approach in order to maintain a document in the collaborative editor. The problem with this approach is that the number of users which can be supported is fairly low. All communication uses the server which itself becomes a bottleneck of the system.
An alternative approach is intended to be used in this project which let users of the document communicate on a peer-to-peer basis without using a central database. Instead all users maintain local copies of parts of the document and communicate on changes of the document.
The objective of this project is to develop an editor (for textual or graphical documents) providing a user interface that suits a decentralised maintenance of the shared document. An important point is to develop good ways for users to interact with the state of the document. Therefore one must elaborate on objects which form the shared document and rules how users can modify the document. Since the document should be handled in a dynamic way one must also consider how users can join or leave a document.