CRATE: Writing Stories Together with our Browsers

Keywords: Collaborative editor, decentralized, real-time

Authors: Brice Nédelec, Pascal Molli, Achour Mostefaoui

Real-time collaborative editors are common tools to distribute work across space, time, and organizations. Unfortunately, mainstream editors such as Google Docs rely on central servers and raises privacy and scalability issues. CRATE is a real-time decentralized collaborative editor that runs directly in web browsers thanks to WebRTC. Compared to state-of-the-art, CRATE is the first real-time editor that only requires browsers in order to support collaborative editing and to transparently handle from small to large groups of users. Consequently, CRATE can also be used in massive online lectures, TV shows or large conferences to allow users to share their notes. CRATE's properties rely on two scientific results: (i) a replicated sequence structure with sub-linear upper bound on space complexity; this prevents the editor from running costly distributed garbage collectors, (ii) an adaptive peer sampling protocol; this prevent the editor from oversizing routing tables, hence from letting small networks pay the price of large networks. This paper describes CRATE, its properties and its usage.

Available at

• [proceedings](http://www2016.net/proceedings/companion/p231.pdf)
• [ACM](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2890539)
• [HAL](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01303333)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{nedelec2016crate,
  author = {N{\'e}delec, Brice and Molli, Pascal and Mostefaoui, Achour},
  title = {CRATE: Writing Stories Together with Our Browsers},  
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on
  World Wide Web},
  series = {WWW '16 Companion},
  year = {2016},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-4144-8},
  location = {Montr{\'e}al, Qu{\'e}bec, Canada},
  pages = {231--234},
  numpages = {4},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890539},
  doi = {10.1145/2872518.2890539},
  acmid = {2890539},
  publisher = {International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee},
  address = {Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland},
  keywords = {collaborative editor, decentralized, real-time},
} 

Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the French ANR project SocioPlug (ANR-13-INFR-0003), and by the DeSceNt project granted by the Labex CominLabs excellence laboratory (ANR-10-LABX-07-01).

Experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid'5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other organizations (see official website).