Peer-to-Peer Interactions

Preston So

April 08, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Potential applications for y-webrtc and how to get involved - part 5

What does the future of peer-to-peer real-time collaboration look like? Thanks to the spread of emerging web technologies like WebRTC, a protocol for communication between browsers on discrete systems, Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, and y-webrtc, the Yjs connector for WebRTC, a new range of use cases is entering the picture. While there are limitations, such as certain ceilings on the number of simultaneous collaborators, developments like y-webrtc are sure to reshape the landscape...

Preston So

March 30, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Handling many connections and applications for Yjs - part 4

Real-time collaboration is now more reality than ambition, but several obstacles remain, particularly in the form of peer-to-peer collaboration when many collaborators are involved. While Yjs, an open-source framework for real-time collaboration, and WebRTC, a new protocol for peer-to-peer communication now seeing wide browser support, permit editorial collaboration between peers in a graceful way, things get more complicated when many users enter the picture. Nonetheless, thanks to y-webrtc, the Yjs integration with WebRTC, we can...

Preston So

March 19, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: How y-webrtc enables many connected peers - part 3

While collaboration between users has been a fixture of content management systems and web applications in general for many years, the prospect of true real-time, peer-to-peer collaboration remains relatively elusive despite the proliferation of new technologies over the past several years. Luckily, this may soon change thanks to the evolution of real-time collaboration frameworks like Yjs and the availability and level of browser support enjoyed by the new WebRTC protocol. With both Yjs and WebRTC...

Preston So

March 17, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Introducing signaling servers and y-webrtc - part 2

When it comes to the most exciting new developments in the field of web applications, perhaps no other phenomenon is gaining as much momentum as the prospect of true peer-to-peer collaborative editing. With its considerable obstacles and difficulties, collaborative editing has long been one of the less-explored realms of editorial workflows. Fortunately, thanks to new solutions like Yjs and better browser support for the WebRTC protocol, real-time collaboration is not only possible but also accessible...

Preston So

March 05, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: How to get started with peer-to-peer editing - part 1

Peer-to-peer collaborative editing is one of the most fascinating frontiers of editorial collaboration in our industry. As a longstanding requirement with formidable technical challenges, enabling collaborative editing in a decentralized fashion has been a dream for many years. However, with the advent of emerging technologies in the real-time collaboration space, most notably Yjs and WebRTC, the possibilities for peer-to-peer editing are not only realistic but compelling for a wide range of ecosystems. With the help...

Preston So

February 13, 2020

Yjs deep dive: Why awareness is essential for collaborative applications - part 3

In part 3 learn more about Yjs and the specific features that make it shine in the realm of real-time collaboration: namely awareness, offline editing, and versioning. In the next two installments of this blog series, we cover all three of these essential topics.

Preston So

January 30, 2020

Yjs deep dive: What is Yjs and operational transformation? - part 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | At the moment, real-time collaboration is one of the hottest topics in the content management space. After all, one of the key features still absent from many content management systems (CMS) is shared editing among multiple users that successfully handles a variety of conditions. Applications like Google Docs, for instance, leverage a centralized server that manages all...

Preston So

November 11, 2019

Evaluating real-time collaborative editing solutions for a top Fortune 50 company

In today's editorial landscape, content creators can expect not only to touch a document countless times to revise and update content, but also to work with other writers from around the world, often on distributed teams, to finalize a document collaboratively and in real time. For this reason, collaborative editing, or shared editing, has become among the most essential and commonly requested features for any content management solution straddling a large organization.