Realtime edit synchronization

[jace]

Collaborative editing of forms is becoming increasingly necessary. While a large text field can be setup with something like Etherpad Lite, there's no obvious solution for forms with many fields. I propose we do this as a standard solution with Baseframe's render_form.

1. This only applies to /edit endpoints. /new is not shared.
2. When an edit page is loaded, render_form creates a redis-backed cache of the form (not the source object).
3. As the form is edited, data (single field at a time) is submitted back to the server (preferably via a websocket) and the cache is updated without form validation.
4. All other instances of the same page get a push notification (preferably via a websocket) with the updated data and will update the form in place.

This solution doesn't work for client-side forms such as dynamically added fields without additional work, but it's a useful start. It's also inefficient for textareas and may interfere with the user's own editing, so we may have to disable it there.

[miteshashar]

1. Fair amount of complexities.
   1. State management will be a huge concern to handle. One needs to know what state he/she is looking at; draft or published, while both co-exist.
   2. Field contentions & locks.
   3. Mobile compatibility.
   4. Cross-compatibility with input-involving plugins like Codemirror, TinyMCE, etc.
2. @jace Reminds me of the conversation on hipchat, where you mentioned we are less likely to need two-way websockets. Here is a big use case.

Interesting find. Sadly not in active development.
Promising nodejs port of mobwrite. But, again not in active development.

Interesting slideshow
Further finds from the slideshow:

• Google Drive's Realtime API. This could be the reason behind mobwrite's development being halted.
• Open Cooperative Web Framework
• ShareJS

[cscott]

https://togetherjs.com/ is related as well.