Etherpad Integration

[JohnMcLear]

Etherpad is a pretty mature alternative to polyphony. I think polyphony would benefit a lot from integration with Etherpad.

C should perform better on the server so it might make sense to provide a libot plugin for Etherpad so that libot can handle the OTs, that way you can leverage all of Etherpad's internals for team pads, rich editing, plugins etc.

Another way of looking at it is running the C library on a client device (iOS etc) would add strong value to both Etherpad and Polyphony.

[gcurtis]

Hey John,

My goal with Polyphony is exactly what you described - use libot to handle all the OT logic and then plug it in to an editor. I created Polyphony because I wanted to be able to create a native realtime editor on mobile without having to hack around with WebViews, and writing the OT in C meant I could reuse it between mobile, web, or desktop.

I actually had no idea that Etherpad was so extensible that you could swap out the OT logic. The Polyphony site uses quill.js for its editor because I found it really easy to integrate with their deltas API - http://quilljs.com/docs/deltas/. Does the Etherpad editor have something similar? If so, I'd be happy to give it a shot.

[JohnMcLear]

Hey Greg, sounds great!

Etherpad uses a changeset library, I'm no expert in it, I tinker more on the front end.. Wiki docs for it here: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Changeset-Library

I know people have changed the backend of Etherpad's OT handling, Etherpad exposes a plugin system so you could just in theory provide hooks for OT operations. I don't think Etherpad provides that out of the box but adding the hooks wouldn't be painful in "theory"..

[dmitryuv]

@gcurtis hey, what's about rich text? Does libot supports it? Idea about native editor sounds great, but the main challenge is to have a native component for rich-editing that exports delta API (like quill), unfortunately I haven't heard about any.

[gcurtis]

@dmitryuv Rich text is the next feature on my list for libot. iOS 7+ has decent rich text support with TextKit which is what the Polyphony iOS demo uses. You can create attributed strings and apply rich text formatting - very similar to how Etherpad works (I believe).

Android also has very basic support for doing rich text natively, but it's much less powerful that TextKit.

[dmitryuv]

@gcurtis so you say it would be possible to extend this iOS demo to sync rich text? That would be extremely cool.

[gcurtis]

@dmitryuv that's the plan! I've only tried playing around with TextKit a little bit, but it seems possible.