Rising from the ashes of Google Wave. 🙂 Operational transforms are starting to show up all over the place.
Originally shared by Vic Fryzel
If you haven’t heard yet, we just launched one of the most forward-looking developer products: the Google Drive Realtime API. This API allows your application to build realtime collaboration on Google infrastructure with essentially no overhead. This is huge. The ability to add operational transforms into your application in a performant way with an established data model allows you to make game-changing updates to your app. Don’t think like a chat client, think like Google Docs: multiple cursors from multiple people in the same file at the same time editing the same words!
Check out the blog post below and our documentation for more, but if there’s one thing you should be doing today it’s checking out this API and building a test application.
http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/03/build-collaborative-apps-with-google.html
That’s cool, but I worry about depending too much on google.
It’s not the Google part that makes this interesting to me, but the use of OTs.
WebSockets begging to be used, http://meteor.com has a great infrastructure for this. The interesting quote from the Wikipedia article for me:
“The algorithms are really hard and time consuming to implement correctly. … Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation#Critique_of_OT