How to Build Your Own Google Docs (Without Google)

wired.com

40 points·jamest··6 comments

This is, or appears to be, a collaborative text editor, of which there are many available, and a fairly basic one at that. And not a google docs replacement. Am I missing something?

From www.firepad.io

How is Firepad different than other collaborative text editors?

Most collaborative text editors require special code to run on a server, making them impractical to use if you're not already using the right server stack. Firepad has no server dependencies and instead relies on Firebase for real-time data synchronization. This means that it's easy to add Firepad to any application, even static websites. All you need to do is drop in the JavaScript files and go.

To me, the point is that there are many complex challenges to building a real-time collaborative text editor -- so we are stuck with the feature sets of the few people who spent the time to tackle those challenges.

Firebase eliminates much of the complexity, so that if you had a need for a collaborative text editor with one specific, niche feature, it may not be unreasonable to just sit down and build it yourself.

This is just a hack to show the power of firebase. Not that you should start using it as docs replacement but more of get an idea on what all you can do with firebase.

Direct link to the mentioned project: https://github.com/firebase/firepad

I can build "my own Google Docs" with a series of many different document store databases. Why would I have a proprietary API back-end I cannot host myself as an alternative to Google? Let me host my own live text editor, text, editor, and all, xthxbai. The irony is pretty funny though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com