Seamless Synchronization for Collaborative Web Services

Abstract

Collaborative web services, which allow multiple people to work together on the same data, are becoming increasingly popular. However, current state-of-the-art frameworks for interactive client-side replication cannot handle network disruptions well, or suffer from large metadata overhead when clients are short-lived. This demonstration will show OWebSync, a generic web middleware for data synchronization in browser-based applications and interactive groupware. It offers a fine-grained data synchronization model, using state-based Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, and leverages Merkle-trees in the data model for efficient synchronization. We provide an interactive demonstration of a drawing application that workshop attendees can experiment with. We will also demonstrate the robustness in disconnected and offline settings.