|
|
|
|
|
|
by thrashh
1688 days ago
|
|
|
Does no one remember Etherpad? It had collaborative editing and Google snatched them up. A year later they released Google Wave and Google Docs also got collaborative editing at some point. Even then, Etherpad was not the first collaborative editor. It was just the first (to my knowledge) online one but I believe desktop ones existed for years. And of course, the principle used behind collaborative editing (operational transform) is from at least 1989. CRDT is the newer game in town now and it may replace OT entirely. As a third party observer, I take it they both Google Wave and the collaborative editing in GSuite derive from Etherpad, and Etherpad itself is built upon the academic papers that predate it. If that is the case, while I’m sure some code may have migrated over, Google Wave “died” but Etherpad lives on. |
|
|
The tech for appjet was primarily Javascript server-side, and I believe it used GWT for Java->Javascript client-side. This was seen as very odd to many inside Google, as javascript on the server was a new concept back then, and a far cry from the "officially supported" languages for development at Google.
While the initial launch of Wave went ~okay, the product itself had massive scalability issues. The Appjet/Etherpad team was then aqui-hired and quickly relocated to Australia. While one would think they were acquired for the similarities between Wave and Etherpad, they were instead tasked with "fixing" the javascript server-side performance situation. This made sense to management as appjet had been pioneering the concept since before Node was a thing.
In the end this wasn't a great outcome for the acquired team, but is typical of the aqui-hiring Google does.
Doc and sheets later added comments and realtime collaborative editing, but it was all reimplemented and never directly lifted from Wave's implementation.