Real-time collaborative editing systems such as GoogleDocs or Etherpad are well known and widely used. They allow a group of people to collaborate on a same document from different places at any time. Unfortunately, these systems have scalability limitations regarding the number of users who can collaborate at the same time on a document or the number of concurrent changes they can handle. However, we observe nowadays a change of scale on the numbers of people collaborating on a document: besides small groups, communities of users are now using these tools to coordinate and achieve their writing activities.
In this talk, I will motivate the need for peer-to-peer real-time collaborative editing systems. I will give a brief overview of optimistic replication mechanisms suitable for this kind of systems and give a focus on a conflict-free replicated data type: a sequence whose atoms have an adaptive granularity. Finally, I will present our current prototype: the MUTE collaborative editor — a peer-to-peer real-time web collaborative editor.
