ShareJS – Live concurrent editing in your app

Based on the amount of trolling, 'penis' and other garbage inserted into that textarea, Hacker News readership must include a fairly large number of idiotic children.<p>This is why we can't have nice things.

Careful. People are inserting and executing their own JS on that page.<p>I got several popups (alerts) with the word Faggot in them in my browser after I let the page sit for 10 minutes.

After hitting HN, this could be viewed as a text version of chatroulette… you don't know what you'll find, but it's probably not pretty. :o)

Always wanted to ask: Isn't google's diff-match-patch library suitable for the same thing? It can apply patches to altered input pretty nicely.<p>Is there a conceptual difference? Diffs support all types of operations - insert, remove, replace. I'm really curious about realtime collaboration, but can't decide which is the right tool for the job.

We're using ShareJS in production for the authoring side of <a href="http://theconversation.edu.au" rel="nofollow">http://theconversation.edu.au</a> - it's brilliant and solved most of our collaborative editing pain.<p>If only it wasn't written in node....

See also: Google Wave, open-sourced as Apache Wave.<p><a href="http://incubator.apache.org/wave/" rel="nofollow">http://incubator.apache.org/wave/</a><p>The architecture for Wave is really difficult to get a handle on, though.<p>Relative ease of use is a major benefit of ShareJS, though I can't fully vouch for its algorithmic correctness. I've been meaning to contribute some additional tests to the project.

Pasting in most of Shakespeare's works seems to have made editing non-responsive for about 30s. Pretty neat though.

This would be a great way to enable collaborative email sharing. I always wanted a way to let someone spellcheck, review or edit a mail I was writing (Inside Gmail)<p>For now it's Google-docs, then copy/paste, but sharing the mail on the go would be so useful.

Great work man! What I think it needs next is some sort of cursor indicator - preferably with some sort of user id. Something similar to how Google Docs did it. Keep it up!

Also see Etherpad Lite, much easier to get started and way more features.