Hi,
we’re building a collaborative learning platform in Meteor/React (FROG), where we’re using ShareDB heavily - both ot-json as the backing store for collaborative activities (activities are pluggable, and they get access to a shared document, which they can structure as they want - this gives us a lot of flexibility), and ot-text for collaborative text editing. We are having some problems scaling up (both because of Meteor and possibly ShareDB), and I dream of having a “OT as a service” thing, where I could just run an Elixir server or cluster, which would be compatible with the front-end ShareDB client (or something similar). All the JS code could be kept - and it would be super-fast, scaleable etc.
I did try a few years ago to rewrite the login in ot-text to Elixir, it was an interesting exercise… It’s pretty functional code (all functions which take an input and produce an output without side-effects), but they use closures a lot, which I changed to recursive functions. I even set up a way to run the (very extensive) JS test harness for ot-text against my library - and it got pretty far. I never fixed all the failing tests, and I kind of abandoned it, because I didn’t have the push to move it forwards (I was in the middle of running experiments for my PhD thesis, and didn’t actually need it. My very old abandoned attempt.
I still think OT is amazingly powerful, and it seems tailor-made for Elixir… I would love to see someone try again to make a production-ready OT server in Elixir - having a compatibility mode with ShareDB would let a lot of products switch easily, and would work well with existing extensions like Rich text etc, but investigating a more efficient transmission format would be interesting too…
Note that the ShareDB people have been working on a new version of ot-json for years, which apparently is soon ready.
If you pursue this, please let me know, as I’d be very interested to follow along, and maybe use it. We’re also working on collaborative writing analytics (predict collaboration quality etc), if anyone is interested.
best
Stian Håklev
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
