formic: Building Collaborative Applications with Operational Transformation

Abstract

As part of the ongoing revolution of the way people work in distributed teams, the need of applications for real-time collaboration is increasing. Commercial products like Google Docs set the landmark for modern web-based collaboration. In this work we provide a library that utilizes the underlying technology, namely Operational Transformation, to simplify the development of collaborative web applications. Our library formic features a novel transformation function that enables simultaneous editing of JSON objects.