Shared Editing on the Web: A Classification of Developer Support Libraries

Together with the current shift to cloud-based solutions, various Web applications have been enriched with collaborative features. These collaborative features enable users to work together on digital products like documents, diagrams and videos at the same time on a global scale. Implementing them require developers to have knowledge about both complex algorithms for maintaining consistency on one hand and usability issues on the other hand. Besides developing apps from scratch, Web application developers often meet these challenges by employing ready-made libraries for shared editing on the Web. A new generation of these shared editing frameworks has emerged recently; several of these libraries are available as open source solutions. In this paper, we first present general and browser-specific requirements for shared editing like consistency algorithms and means of workspace awareness. Then, state-of-the-art frameworks for shared editing are analyzed in respect of their support of these requirements. As a contribution, we have identified missing features like the availability of general awareness widgets and new architectural designs due to emerging Web standards. To that end, we demonstrate prototypes addressing some of these issues.