[sambroner]

I'm really glad to see an article like this. I've worked in the space for a while (Fluid Framework) and there's a growing number of libraries addressing realtime collab. One of the key things that many folks miss is that building a collaborative app with real time coauthoring is tricky. Setting up a websocket and hoping for the best won't work.

The libraries are also not functionally equivalent. Some use OT, some use CRDTs, some persist state, some are basically websocket wrappers, fairly different perf guarantees in both memory & latency etc. The very different capabilities make it complicated to evaluate all the tools at once.

Obviously I'm partial the Fluid Framework, but not many realtime coauthoring libraries have made it as easy to get started as Replicache. Kudos to them!

A few solutions with notes...

  - Fluid Framework - My old work... service announced at Microsoft Build '21 and will be available on Azure
  - yJS - CRDTs. Great integration with many open source projects (no service)
  - Automerge - CRDTs. Started by Martin Kleppman, used by many at Ink & Switch (no service)
  - Replicache - Seen here, founder has done a great job with previous dev tools (service integration)
  - Codox.io - Written by Chengzheng Sun, who is super impressive and wrote one of my fav CRDT/OT papers
  - Chronofold - CRDTs. Oriented towards versioned text. I'm mostly unfamiliar
  - Convergence.io - Looks good, but I haven't dug in
  - Liveblocks.io - Seems to focus on live interactions without storing state
  - derbyjs - Somewhat defunct. Cool, early effort.
  - ShareJS/ShareDB - Somewhat defunct, but the code and thinking is very readable/understandable and there are good OSS integrations
  - Firebase - Not the typical model people think of for RTC, but frequently used nonetheless

I should add... I talk to many folks in the space. People are very welcoming and excited to help each other. Really fun space right now.

[nikodunk]

I've used YJS and can strongly recommend. https://github.com/yjs/yjs

Built a Google Docs like rich text collaborator for a client on Express/Psql and React. Worked like a charm. The hardest part was dealing with ports on AWS to be honest.

[BackBlast]

I'll have to look at some of these, I've reviewed some of these but not all. You are missing some I'm familiar with.

PouchDB+CouchDB work well out of the box with minimal fuss for open pieces you can just plug into this role. PouchDB handles the client's state persist and replication on the client, couchdb is the reliable cloud service you can replicate to.

Meteor, at least their pre-apollo stack had realtime collab type features with their mini-mongo client and oplog tailing.

[winrid]

DerbyJS and ShareDB/Racer are meant to go together.

I know of one big company using it extensively, hundreds of millions of messages a day! :)

[moralestapia]

Could you share more info about the use case?

Like a Google Docs kind of thing or w?

[winrid]

In this case, the entire product uses it. Every button, field, list, is "live" with derby+sharedb and scaled by horizontally scaling redis and the DB.

[vyrotek]

Fluid Framework looks pretty cool! I somehow missed the Build announcement about this.

Maybe it's just me, but it has a SignalR + Orleans sort of vibe to it when I think about the types of problems it solves. I will definitely be digging into this a bit more.