Kevin Jahns

Shared editing is the ability to collaboratively edit the same text in real-time. The market for shared editing solutions is fragmented. Once you choose a solution you will be locked into using a specific editor and a specific backend. Yjs is a data synchronization framework that aims to enable shared editing in all open-source editors using any networking stack.

Yjs is a data synchronization framework that is specifically designed for creating shared editing applications like Google Docs. The number of editors, that Yjs supports, is steadily growing. At this time we implemented shared-editing support for six of the most prominent open-source rich-text editors - including Quill, ProseMirror, and CodeMirror. We are currently working on integrating Yjs in Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor.

Since Yjs is network agnostic and does not require a central authority to resolve sync conflicts, it is possible to use any networking stack to share document updates of the collaborative document. We created an ecosystem of modules that handle data synchronization over, for example, WebRTC, Dat Protocol, IPFS, and traditional client-server connections via WebSockets.

In this lightning talk, we want to show the huge potential of Yjs that hopefully will make it the go-to solution for creating shared editing applications on the web.

Yjs is an open source framework that can be used to collaborate in real-time on arbitrary data types. It is based on a new operational transformation-like approach that can be used in peer-to-peer settings on the Web, using standard communication protocols such as WebRTC or XMPP. Part of the shared editing projects family (e.g. ShareJs, OpenCoweb, etc.), Yjs currently implements support for text, XML and JSON and proved to be very fast and reliable. In this lightning talk we introduce the concepts and features of the Yjs framework and discuss how it can be leveraged to design the next generation of peer-to-peer shared editing tools. We conclude the talk with a short demo that highlights the capabilities of the framework.

Yjs solves many of the current issues for concurrency control and consistency maintenance approaches in collaborative software. In order to achieve this, we created a new approach for optimistic concurrency control, which was formally proven to be reliable and to output the best time complexity (compared to existing dedicated related literature). The approach was designed to support real-time shared editing on linear, tree and graph data structures. A short part of this lightning talk aims to present the core concepts of our approach.

Designed to work on both peer-to-peer and client-server architectures, Yjs can be easily embedded in Web applications in order to foster collaboration. Developed in Javascript, the framework outputs very good scaling capabilities in the number of users and operations in test environments. Yjs currently supports text, JSON and XML data types and was tested using WebRTC and XMPP as an underlying communication protocol.

In this lightning talk, the Yjs framework will be presented to the wider OS community for the first time. We consider our framework to be developer friendly, but given the opportunity of a lightning talk, we would like to invite FOSDEM developers to use Yjs and share with us their experience. Ideally we aim to establish connections and potential collaborations, in order to improve our open source project.