Bring Real Time Collaboration to ActionText

[kwent (Quentin Rousseau)]

Hi,

So it’s almost 2021 and there still nothing magic out of the box to add Real Time Collaboration to a Rails stack.

But as far as i know, we almost have everything to make it happen:

• ActionCable for websockets client/server communication.
• ActionText based on top of trix.js is using a document model,
• OT algorithm or CRDT algorithm to solve collaboration conflicts. (Probably need to create new trix.js api’s to access operations)
• Using a jsonb column instead storing the rendered html, we could store the solved document model for all nodes and broadcast it and restore the client document.
• Adding multi cursor support + tooltip (to display who is editing name) to trix.js
• ActiveStorage would be compatible since it’s just modifying the document model.

Am i missing anything ?

Does the rails team has any plan on implementing something of that nature ? That would make the world a better place and enabled collaboration for everyone.

Regards

Useful links:

GitHub - ball-hayden/ot.rb: A Ruby port of the Operational Transformation library ot.js

GitHub - Operational-Transformation/ot.js

GitHub - automerge/automerge: A JSON-like data structure (a CRDT) that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically.

GitHub - benaubin/rails-collab: Collaborative Editing on Rails (using ProseMirror)

[Matt_Buck]

I’ve been following this space pretty closely for the last few years, and I have a few suggestions for anybody else that is interested:

• A great blog post from Aha! covering their approach.
  • A demo app they built.
• If you’re using Vue, tiptap is probably a good option. Looks like that’s what GitLab is going with.
• Personally, I’ll probably be giving the yjs ProseMirror binding a shot.
• Room Service, a collaboration-as-a-service product.
• Convergence is another collaboration-as-a-service option, and they’re now Open Source.

Some general resources on realtime collaboration:

• We Built Collaborative Editing for Our Newsroom’s CMS. Here’s how. – Slacker News
• Evaluating real-time collaborative editing solutions for a top Fortune 50 company | Tag1 Consulting

[pinzonjulian (Julian)]

I think you’ll find this thread interesting

Configurable ActionText

I’d be happy to see an easy way to slim down the formatting options available in Action Text. I’d even be interested in seeing a different text editor swapped in, but that would be a massive undertaking, which would require a long-term committed contributor to step forward and do the work

It doesn’t have anything specific about real time collaboration but it does touch on the subject of actiontext in the long run