CollabEd: A Platform for Collaboratizing Existing Editors

Abstract

CollabEd is a platform for easily collaboratizing linear editing systems. We will describe our modular design, which is geared toward building CollabEd plugins for existing editors and eliminating the need for developers to provide or understand the networking and data consistency controls required for real-time, synchronous collaborative editing. In this paper we showcase our open-source CollabEd application already ported for use with a number of popular programming editors (Eclipse, NetBeans, jEdit, etc.) and a drawing program (DrawSWF). The CollabEd platform is built on top of our optimistic replication data-model (MSET) that preserves local-site editing response time without the use of operational transformation. One of the features we will highlight is the ability to save collaboration sessions for later playback with user-specific editing statistics.