Collaborative offline web applications using conflict-free replicated data types

Abstract

The use cases for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) that are studied in the literature are limited to collaborative editing applications and data stores. The communication protocols used to distribute replica updates in these scenarios are usually assumed to be some form of highly scalable gossip protocol. In this paper, a new type of application for CRDTs is introduced and studied: collaborative offline web applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of CRDTs in this scenario, and analyze the trade-offs of three existing communication protocols that can be employed for these applications.