An operational transformation based synchronization protocol for web 2.0 applications

  • Authors:
  • Bin Shao;Du Li;Tun Lu;Ning Gu

  • Affiliations:
  • Fudan University, Shanghai, UNK, China;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Current Web 2.0 services are making mass collaboration a reality. Using a Web browser, people can participate in cooperative work anytime, anywhere from any computing device as long as there is an Internet connection. Lying in the heart of some well-known services is an optimistic consistency control technique called operational transformation (OT). This paper proposes TIPS, a novel sync protocol that adapts OT for Web 2.0 applications. Based on a recent theoretical framework called ABT, it ensures not only convergence but also the right object order for linear documents. Designed to address the HTTP style of communication, TIPS allows clients to sync with the server by independent time intervals and dynamically join and leave at any time. When processing do operations, its time complexity is linear in the total number of operations generated by all clients during one server interval and independent of the size of history. TIPS is efficient for supporting a spectrum of (near-)realtime to asynchronous collaboration editing tasks.