beck5

Here is the thing, I want a company to run my CI server, I am happy to pay for this service, yet private paid plans are still not available on Travis CI after a very long time. I know its always easy to say from the outside, but why are new features being added when they have not got a solid business model running? Donations are great but is this a business I can trust or an open source charity where people might get bored and give up in 18 months time?

I am actually very flattered that they say its a clone of my site (http://sharelatex.com) at the top of the read me, thanks! I think there are now about 107 different online LaTeX editors.

(I work on the same site/problem as author)

We would prefer node did not deal with the https, I actually did a previous blog post showing how performance degraded https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/posts/nodejs_http_vs_https.h....

Options like Ngnix and haproxy without pound/stud are quite recent and we have not gotten around to trying them out.

In regards to clustering, running socket.io in a cluster with redis store is another world of memory leaking pain. Hopefully socket.io 1.0 with engine.io will solve this but its been nearly released for several months now.

I am now starting to question the value of websockets, long polling is a lot simpler in many ways and robust.

Hey creator of ShareLaTeX here, we didn't post on here (again) but we have been releasing a lot of new stuff since the last time the site was on the home page about 1 year ago to the day. Split view, command auto complete, multiple compilers and history are all done. Spell check, git integration and dropbox sync are just around the corner.

The main thing that has happend is merging with http://www.scribtex.com with both of us now working on ShareLaTeX full time.

Thank you for all the support and feedback we have been receiving, its been wonderful, please keep letting us know what you think!

What looks to be the next step which is nginx and lua based.

Does this mean Hipache is likely to be dead in a couple of years?

Sorry I don't fully understand, you can invite collaborators on sharelatex into the project via the project settings area. Free accounts are capped to having 1 collaborator (1 person + yourself). Please drop me an email henry.oswald at sharelatex.com

We don't have an automated way yet but there will be one eventually, most users are doing it add hock as you can import zip files easily. It is up to you which tool you want to use, sharelatex still lacks the git push and pull which may be a deal breaker for you but it is the future.

Don't worry we are working hard to get all the functionality of ScribTeX fully incorporated into ShareLaTeX (git push & pull). We also have no long term plans on turning off scribtex while people still use it, but the focus is sharelatex.

Yeah we do offer a LaTeX compile api (it's what powers scribtex and sharelatex). Drop us an email team at sharelatex.com and one of us will sort something out for you.

Founder of http://www.ShareLaTeX.com here, the guys at writelatex have done a great job of making a new clear home page since last time they were on HackerNews (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385300) the example presentation and no sign in required is a really great touch as it helps quickly bring down the bar for those new to LaTeX.

The online LaTeX editor is not an easy problem to solve, compiling massive projects (hundreds of megs) elastically with several different compilers is not something you can crack in a weekend hence why I merge with http://www.scribtex.com.

Good luck to writelatex!

Lua seems to be a bit of a sleeping giant in web development so it will be interesting to see what becomes of this. Momentum is vital, this is something node.js has in spades which is resulting in a very polished and robust product, great ecosystem and wide adoption. That will be the hardest thing for luvit to replicate. Good luck!

I was in China just last month and was surprised how openly everyone circumvents the blocks. I stayed in a very large 25+ floor 4* hotel where the entire free wifi went through a VPN. My Chinese friend said the government turn a blind eye because they know business needs it and they want the business.

I would start by spending a week or two wrapping the application in Acceptance tests (cucumber/capybara) just so when you do make a change you are able to quickly find out to a semi decent level of confidence things are ok.

I would also recommend Working Effectively with Legacy Code By Robert C. Martin.

Good luck!

Creator of http://www.sharelatex.com here. LaTeX collaboration and environment setup is a big problem, online collaborative environments are going to become more popular. The more of them out there the better so good luck to jdleesmiller and writeLaTeX.

writeLaTeX has a nice split view which I have not implemented yet. The rate of update from collaborators seems to be relatively slow (compared to sharelatex). I would be interested in knowing the architecture behind the scenes.

Thanks for answering. I would still personally prefer to see some unit tests checking each function behaves as expected, this is not so much to prove that the thing works now but make sure it can be changed safely over the next few years so I can pull down the latest version with confidence.

e.g. getBackendFromHostHeader inside worker.js does a lot of things, if I were the author I would have it wrapped up in unit tests.

Also important to not fall down the hole in a couple of years where these shared libraries are being used all over the place and changing them becomes hard. Good to always question if they should be a module or perhaps their own api.

load balancing websockets has been a pain of mine on sharelatex.com and I will have a good play with this.

However one thing that jumps out at me is the low number of tests. There only appear to be a few Acceptance tests. For a serious bit of software like a load balancer I would expect to see a fair few unit tests.

I wrote a LaTeX syntax highlighter for it. I found the easiest thing was to copy and paste a simple one and build from there.

That is living an fairly decent life. You could scrape on £1k a month if you really wanted to.

The thing is when you are still going to be debugging in a different language, haml -> html, coffee -> js.

As a CoffeeScript guy I think one of its main strengths is its harder to shoot yourself in the foot with is great for beginners but you have to be careful a beginner doesn't just bind all the way down using =>

Here is a copy of it on sharelatex.com - https://www.sharelatex.com/project/4f78ebb84bae4a991a00015e

7digital .Net & JavaScript devs, Sys Admin - London UK

7Digital is electronic media company (music and books), our API powers Samsung Music, Blackberry, Ubuntu our own website and loads more. Now also do ebooks powering services like Waterstones. Loads of interesting problems including scaling an API to serve 170,000+ requests per hour, processing and serving hundreds of TB's of data world wide while innovating. You get 10% of your time to innovate with, regular katas/dojo's. We are established, 7 years old, and profitable, 70+ people based in main old street office, ~45 of which are technical jobs. Fantastic work mentality, we always work the right way even if it takes a little longer, i.e. we don't cut corners on quality. http://about.7digital.net/careers

I have had multiple people tell me that my site (https://www.sharelatex.com) has helped with this, firstly more advanced people are able to help learners, also the environment is already set-up.

The LaTeX wikibook is he best place I went to understand the basics of LaTeX http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

The problem with ShareLaTeX is the compiling of the latex documents, compiling a pdf may take a few seconds, if 10 people do that at the same time then things start to slow down....

Makes sense when you get a bit bigger, for me a load balancer would just about double my hosting costs at the moment. Probably the difference between a weekend project like ShareLaTeX and a startup of 4 people.

I've not looked properly but future suport is quite important. I have been upgrading to bootstrap 2.0 and there are a lot of breaking changes, having future versions available would be something I would want to see, even if it requires and upgrade fee.

This is great. I would love a nicer home page for http://www.sharelatex.com. I looked at ones on theme forest but didn't want one framework for my homepage and one for everything else. Will defiantly look at what comes up there.

On stealing the css: your market are people who know the effort it takes to build something and are probably likely to pay $15-$50 for a big time saver.

Its not a given but it is doable, the main/basic line of defence is using a chroot jail and having nothing in that root of any interest/value. When I get chance I will do a blog post on it.

I am still getting some styles ready on the site. It all got very popular a bit to early for me!