Hacker News Reader

So I started building this as a coding exercise for an interview, I'd particularly be interested in getting feedback on my approach to Operational Transformation: http://gpickard.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/my-approach-to-oper...

View on HN

When I did http://collabedit.com I used the approach outlined at: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi... with an md5 hash for the "Operational Parentage" piece.

It was pretty tough to implement (for me at least). Especially when I got to using the "Bridger" and "Buffer" to transform.

Your approach seems much simpler. Do you retain the ability to "play back" the edits like etherpad did?

How big can a document get before you run into the precision issue you mentioned?

No I actually cannot play back yet. But it's not hard to implement, it even would be relatively easy to selectively play back only certain edits. I believe in the worst case a few thousand edits would suffice (though it would be rather tedious on the keyboard to do: type - then go back one with the arrow keys and type again).

Collabedit looks nice and solid! (Hadn't been aware of it.) Did you roll your own editor or did you use something like ACE or CodeMirror?

I used EditArea http://www.cdolivet.com/editarea/editarea/exemples/exemple_f...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com