Comment by phsource | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phsource | Hacker News Reader

Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com) is a Google Docs for planning travel, and naturally, we had to figure this out early in the process.

If you're on a Node.js/React stack, we highly recommend using the combination of OT-JSON0 [1] and ShareDB [2], two excellent libraries. OT-JSON0 lets you perform operational transforms on any JSON-serializable structure pretty intuitively, and ShareDB handles synchronizing it between multiple clients and resolving conflicts. Building your own is going to be a pain, so unless your core business is a text editor like TinyMCE, it's probably best to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Another approach that we didn't end up using is Figma's: especially if you're working on anything other than text editing, ask if you actually want to use operational transform. Something simpler might be good enough -- in Figma's case, they use "last write wins" because they were able to break the document into small enough, atomic elements. [3]

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/ot-json0

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/sharedb

[3] https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

We’re actually using ShareDB at Makeswift right now and for us it has become a horrible burden. There are very subtle bugs on their data persistence layer with concurrency and the API is a bit of a mess to work with in my opinion. I’m glad to see other people are having success with it, though.

Ah that's unfortunate; we did find it a bit weird that you have to think of all changes as `ops`, but otherwise, I'm curious as to what you've had issues with.

We also have a custom back-end that's MySQL that may have changed how it work a bit

I've been given advice that ShareDB is "pretty antiquated and not well supported". I'm told it is not difficult to rewrite in modern NodeJS, replacing things like callbacks and event emitters with async/await produces a much simpler and more reliable server.

I came to the same "LWW on fragments" solution for peraspera.io. In a lot of cases, all OT gets you is being able to watch someone else's cursor move around. The new wore off on that a long time ago.

Could you elaborate a bit on that?

I'll cover this in the second post but we will be using ShareDB for our initial launch (although probably building our own once we hit production release).

atomic elements doesn't really extend to arbitrary HTML, which is fine for the simpler editing solutions but not TinyMCE.

To do something like that in arbitrary HTML you wind up locking at the top-level-block boundaries. Locking sounds great as an engineer but it leads to a garbage user experience.

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