I&#39;m looking for a library that would allow me to synchronize text in real-time between multiple users (ala Google Docs).

I&#39;ve stumbled upon Operational Transformation, which seems to fit my needs. Having said that, I understand the gist of OT, but not the math nor implementation of OT.

Thus, I was wondering if there was a drag&#39;n&#39;drop Javascript library that would hook into a text area, generate the transforms, then allow me to apply those transformations onto another client?

(I&#39;ve gotten the Etherpad source, but I can&#39;t make head or tails out of it. If anyone could point out how to leverage on Etherpad&#39;s OT implementation, that&#39;ll be great too!)

Operational Transformation library?

Can someone explain me simply the main differences between Operational Transform and CRDT?

As far as I understand, both are algorithms that permits data to converge without conflict on different nodes of a distributed system.

In which usecase would you use which algorithm?
As far as I understand, OT is mostly used for text and CRDT is more general and can handle more advanced structures right?

Is CRDT more powerful than OT? 

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I ask this question because I am trying to see how to implement a collaborative editor for HTML documents, and not sure in which direction to look first. I saw the ShareJS project, and their attempts to support rich text collaboration on the browser on `contenteditables` elements. Nowhere in ShareJS I see any attempt to use CRDT for that. 

We also know that Google Docs is using OT and it&#39;s working pretty well for real-time edition of rich documents.
Is Google&#39;s choice of using OT because CRDT was not very known at that time? Or would it be a good choice today too?

I&#39;m also interested to hear about other use cases too, like using these algorithms on databases. Riak seems to use CRDT. Can OT be used to sync nodes of a database too and be an alternative to Paxos/Zab/Raft?


All Operational Transform Solutions on Gang of Coders

Total of 2 Operational Transform Solutions

Operational Transformation library?

Differences between OT and CRDT