Operational Transforms
· From the 2010–2013 blog
If you read the title and went jibbly-jibbly, or buhahaha, or ugh then you probably know the pain we are going through right now. If you read the title and think I'm talking about doctors or robot aliens - this post might not be for you... An Operational transform is a way of mathematically thinking about the things that need to happen behind the scenes for a piece of collaborative software to work. Meaning when you and your buddy are hacking away on a Google doc, the software needs to merge your changes with your buddies changes so that you can actually collaborate rather than stomping on one another. And we are way down deep in the underbelly of ugly that is building all of the bits so we can support collaboration. I do have to say that despite being scary - the things that this allows you to do really are pretty neat! Being able to simultaneously edit a graph or a document with another user is pretty darn impressive. Especially when its a feature that previously hasn't been even remotely possible. For anyone interested in Operation Transforms or how to add this kind of support to a software project here is a shortlist of links that helped give me a basic understanding of what we needed to do.