[deleted]
Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#22What a fun service. I can't remember the last time I used the word "fun" in reference to a plain text editor. :)
It's really interesting to watch the POSTs fly by and consider the implications of out-of-order updates, breaks in the open downstream "comet" channel, interleaving potentially conflicting text from different clients. A lot of difficult tradeoffs that they seem to have made good -- or at least plausible -- decisions on.
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#23neat but hardly killer.
Yes they have the handiness of true realtime updates (and I am not denying that isn't a huge feature) but that's hardly a unique feature (or wont be for long).
But then the rest of the UI / feature set is far too bland :( at least get some code highlighting and stuff in there.
Also in our short test earlier it didnt handle mass deletions & editing very well (if I deleted a block of text as someone was adding to it merry hell broke loose :P).
IMO a nice demo of a cool idea but badly executed enough to be no real use. Make me a real time white board and THEN I might take notice :D
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#24neat but hardly killer. Yes they have the handiness of true realtime updates (and I am not denying that isn't a huge feature) but that's hardly a unique feature (or wont be for long). But then the rest of the UI / feature set is far too bland :( at least get some code highlighting and stuff in there. Also in our short test earlier it didnt handle mass deletions & editing very well (if I deleted a block of text as som…
> Make me a real time white board and THEN I might take notice
You mean like http://dabbleboard.com ?
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're forgetting Google didn't develop Google Docs in-house they purchased Writely back in 2006 and that's the codebase Google Docs is built on. Depending on how it was built originally the change might require a massive rewrite...
Was Google Spreadsheets built on top of the Writely codebase? Because their Spreadsheet app is WAY better than their Document app.
No that's based on a different acquisition, 2Web Technologies
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#26"Changes are made in absolute real time, something even Google hasn’t been able to do (Google docs update every fifteen seconds)." To imply that Google 'hasn't been able to do it' is kind of silly. It's more likely that they chose not to do it and/or their scaling requirements made it impractical.
What's the difference between "something even Google hasn’t been able to do" and "their scaling requirements made it impractical"? When you get past the semantics, it's essentially the same thing. Either way, they're not doing it.
Lack of action doesn't imply inability. That's what's different.
A parked car is not a car that's not able to drive. It's a car that's not driving.
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#27What would make this application killer for me is if was embeddable in other applications as a widget (think rich-text editor on steroids). This, plus a git-like backend for revision history, would be just absolutely amazing.
Agreed. Imagine this sort of collaboration in the Heroku editor... Or online collaborative versions of Textmate, emcacs, vim, etc. Be nice if they offered textile and markdown rendering.
> The AppJet team plans on releasing this new server-side software (similar to their previous release but with the addition of Comet functionality and other pieces) completely Open Source as well.
-- from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369500
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#28People have asked us for a way to try it out with other people, so here's a set of pads for news.yc readers to play with:
For the curious, I added this URL to our running web server in 5 minutes with 12 lines of JavaScript:
function render_newsyc_get() {
function countUsers(p) {
return getCollab().getDocument(p).getNumConnectedUsers();
}
var body = BODY({style: 'padding: 20px; font-family: monospace;'});
body.push(H3("Welcome news.ycombinator readers! ",
"Join us in an EtherPad of your choosing:"));
pads.forEach(function(p) {
body.push(A({href: p}, p), ' ('+countUsers(p)+' users)', BR());
});
response.write(HTML(body));
}
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Connection: Keep-Alive
Yes, you can specify keep-alive (Although some browsers refuse to do it in an XHR - Opera for one). However, you still send the full glut of HTTP headers every single request.
True, you still need the headers, what you don't need is a new connection every key stroke. Establishing a new TCP connection is a relatively high cost network item (between all the Acks and Syns you need 3 messages have to go back and forth for it to establish), keep the connection alive, the stuff will run a lot faster.
Re: Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done (By AppJet)
#30"Changes are made in absolute real time, something even Google hasn’t been able to do (Google docs update every fifteen seconds)." To imply that Google 'hasn't been able to do it' is kind of silly. It's more likely that they chose not to do it and/or their scaling requirements made it impractical.
It's not Google's scaling requirements that limit their simultaneity (or, obviously, a deliberate choice). Google Docs uses a different architecture, where a master copy of the document is kept on the server and broadcast every n seconds to all the clients. This is easier to implement, but can't be made fast enough to feel realtime. Etherpad uses a different approach: they ship all the edits to all the users as soon…
Hopefully the mechanism they chose is amenable to cross-user undo. (Though it's currently missing, I'm assuming single-user undo can be added easily enough.)