[gnok]

For anyone else wondering what OT is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

The gist of it seems to be that its a set of data models that make handling concurrency control and conflict resolution easier in the context of a single blob of data being edited by multiple users simultaneously (similar to Google/Apache Wave)

[u041578]

Is anyone aware if Racer uses OT to sync the model as a whole (OT on a tree structure), or if it is used on a per-leaf basis to merge operations on values? Firebase seems to have solved this issue (with their Firepad project) by using their tree/json sync engine to transmit the OT operation primitives.

[nateps]

OT is done at the document level. Documents are JSON objects of arbitrary complexity. Any mutation of the JSON object can be composed against any other mutation of the JSON object.

Firepad doesn't actually do OT of JSON. In Firepad, a string OT algorithm is used to merge text edits, and the metadata describing rich text is separately managed as span objects, which get modified in accordance with text changes.

Firebase provides conflict resolution of JSON structures using their Transaction primitive, which allows them to create a Software Transactional Memory used to update the journal that powers the text OT in Firepad. ShareJS inside of Derby uses a similar approach to allow multiple servers to access the journal, but it is done in Redis with Lua scripting.