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I'm part of the team that makes Zoho Writer (a Google Docs alternative) - https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com We went with OT for our real-time syn

I'm part of the team that makes Zoho Writer (a Google Docs alternative) - https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com We went with OT for our real-time syncing of edits in 2010 and a decade later, we are still sticking with OT for reasons I already stated sometime back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186883 However, in the spirit of "There are no solutions, only trade-offs" CRDTs are absolutely necessary for certain type of syncing - like syncing a set of database nodes. But for systems which already mandate a central server (SaaS/Cloud) and especially for a complex problem like rich-text editing (i.e semantic trees) I still think OT provides better trade-offs than CRDT. I respect Joseph's conviction on CRDTs being the future, so I guess we'll figure this out sometime soon.

cordite 6y ago
What does OT stand for? In the link, OT is aliased to "Operational Transformations"
- dwb 6y ago
  Have you not answered your own question? OT does indeed stand for Operational Transformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
- mjhirn 6y ago
  "Operation Transformation" = "a system that supports collaboration functionalities by separating the high-level transformation (or integration) control from the low-level transformation functions" Source: OT's Wikipedia article But I felt the same. Never heard of "Operation Transformation" before and both OT and its alias were equally opaque to me.
RangerScience 6y ago
Interesting. I might be adding real-time edit syncing to a hobby project sometime soon. Can you share more about the trade-offs?
- lewisjoe 6y ago
  I haven't yet completely watched Martin's talk on CRDTs, so I might come back and stand corrected. For now these are some well known trade-offs A central server: Most OT algorithms depend on a central system for intention preservation. CRDTs are truly distributed and need no central server at all. Memory: Traditionally CRDTs consume more memory because deletions are preserved. OT lets you garbage collect some operations since a central system is already recording those ops and sequencing them as well. Analysing and cancelling ops: OT lets you easily analyse incoming ops and modify/dummy-ify/cancel them without breaking the consistency. This convenience is not necessary for most cases, but really important for rich-text editing. For example when someone merges a couple of table cells when another user is deleting a column, we need to analyze these operations and modify them so as not to end-up with an invalid table structure.
  - passthefist 6y ago
    Seems like another one (based off the article) is ease of use as well. I'm not familiar with either algorithm, but sounds like OT is less complex and easier to understand, which IMO is a decent tradeoff worth considering.
    - alextheparrot 6y ago
      I agree complexity is worth considering, though part of me wonders how important that is in this case. The reason for this intuition is that this is one of core parts of what they’re selling. If you’re going to invest your complexity budget somewhere, it seems like this is a good place for companies dealing with these structures.
    - mdpye 6y ago
      Having worked a little with both, my impression is that OT can get very complex in implementation edge cases. CRDTs are incredibly difficult to design, but if you successfully design one which can model your features, implementation is pretty straightforward. A real world implication is that if you want to add a new operation to a system (like, table column merge, or moving a range of text), with OT, you can probably find a way to extend what you have to get it in there, with a painfully non-linear cost as you add more new operations. With CRDTs, you may find yourself entirely back at the drawing board. But the stuff you do support, you will support pretty well and reliably... Personally, I prefer CRDTs for their elegance, but it can be difficult in a world of evolving requirements
Proven 6y ago
Don't click on a link if you're unsure - from the title or URL - the content is relevant to you. It's equally "disrespectful" to waste reader's time on 101 content if that's now what the post is about.
btreecat 6y ago
My small startup company went with Zoho office at first because of the price. But the features is what has us looking to stay for a while. One thing I would love to see is the addition of wildcard addresses like the way google has and microsoft added (user+site_string@domain.com). Thanks for your hard work on a great product!
- aidos 6y ago
  The Zoho ecosystem is this weird place where you can find almost everything, virtually for free. If you’ve never looked before, check it out - it’s expansive. Frustratingly though, there are so many features heaped in that there is no cohesion. Things are frequently buggy, unreliable and disjointed. I’d almost be able to forgive it but unfortunately the support is really terrible too. I assessed a lot of crm software and each one I kept finding things they didn’t have that zoho had but for the reasons above we ultimately chose something else. Which is a shame, because I would pay them a lot more than they ask, for them to just be a little better.
  - steve19 6y ago
    > Things are frequently buggy, unreliable and disjointed. I’d almost be able to forgive it but unfortunately the support is really terrible too. This is my experience. After years of paying for the service, for multiple users, using tools that seemed to have been forgotten by the dev team, my credit card failed to process one month. Support was not interested in helping me. Not at all. Ended up having to move my team's workflow off Zoho. I had been begging them to bill my card, but they just kept sending me generic emails asking me to try again. Phone support was even less helpful.
- gala8y 6y ago
  Preceding comment like this with OT goes a long way.
Reinmar 6y ago
We went with OT five years ago in CKEditor 5 and we have the same experience. While it would be tempting to try CRDT, it seems to come with too significant tradeoffs in our scenario. My colleague wrote down our thoughts in https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri.... The other aspect of CRDT that's in some scary is what @mdpye explains in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621113. With OT, if we get the corner cases right, we can tune and extend the implementation. With CRDT that might be game over.

cordite 6y ago

What does OT stand for? In the link, OT is aliased to "Operational Transformations"

dwb 6y ago
Have you not answered your own question? OT does indeed stand for Operational Transformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
mjhirn 6y ago
"Operation Transformation" = "a system that supports collaboration functionalities by separating the high-level transformation (or integration) control from the low-level transformation functions" Source: OT's Wikipedia article But I felt the same. Never heard of "Operation Transformation" before and both OT and its alias were equally opaque to me.

RangerScience 6y ago

Interesting. I might be adding real-time edit syncing to a hobby project sometime soon. Can you share more about the trade-offs?

lewisjoe 6y ago
I haven't yet completely watched Martin's talk on CRDTs, so I might come back and stand corrected. For now these are some well known trade-offs A central server: Most OT algorithms depend on a central system for intention preservation. CRDTs are truly distributed and need no central server at all. Memory: Traditionally CRDTs consume more memory because deletions are preserved. OT lets you garbage collect some operations since a central system is already recording those ops and sequencing them as well. Analysing and cancelling ops: OT lets you easily analyse incoming ops and modify/dummy-ify/cancel them without breaking the consistency. This convenience is not necessary for most cases, but really important for rich-text editing. For example when someone merges a couple of table cells when another user is deleting a column, we need to analyze these operations and modify them so as not to end-up with an invalid table structure.
- passthefist 6y ago
  Seems like another one (based off the article) is ease of use as well. I'm not familiar with either algorithm, but sounds like OT is less complex and easier to understand, which IMO is a decent tradeoff worth considering.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    I agree complexity is worth considering, though part of me wonders how important that is in this case. The reason for this intuition is that this is one of core parts of what they’re selling. If you’re going to invest your complexity budget somewhere, it seems like this is a good place for companies dealing with these structures.
  - mdpye 6y ago
    Having worked a little with both, my impression is that OT can get very complex in implementation edge cases. CRDTs are incredibly difficult to design, but if you successfully design one which can model your features, implementation is pretty straightforward. A real world implication is that if you want to add a new operation to a system (like, table column merge, or moving a range of text), with OT, you can probably find a way to extend what you have to get it in there, with a painfully non-linear cost as you add more new operations. With CRDTs, you may find yourself entirely back at the drawing board. But the stuff you do support, you will support pretty well and reliably... Personally, I prefer CRDTs for their elegance, but it can be difficult in a world of evolving requirements

Proven 6y ago

Don't click on a link if you're unsure - from the title or URL - the content is relevant to you. It's equally "disrespectful" to waste reader's time on 101 content if that's now what the post is about.

btreecat 6y ago

My small startup company went with Zoho office at first because of the price. But the features is what has us looking to stay for a while. One thing I would love to see is the addition of wildcard addresses like the way google has and microsoft added (user+site_string@domain.com). Thanks for your hard work on a great product!

aidos 6y ago
The Zoho ecosystem is this weird place where you can find almost everything, virtually for free. If you’ve never looked before, check it out - it’s expansive. Frustratingly though, there are so many features heaped in that there is no cohesion. Things are frequently buggy, unreliable and disjointed. I’d almost be able to forgive it but unfortunately the support is really terrible too. I assessed a lot of crm software and each one I kept finding things they didn’t have that zoho had but for the reasons above we ultimately chose something else. Which is a shame, because I would pay them a lot more than they ask, for them to just be a little better.
- steve19 6y ago
  > Things are frequently buggy, unreliable and disjointed. I’d almost be able to forgive it but unfortunately the support is really terrible too. This is my experience. After years of paying for the service, for multiple users, using tools that seemed to have been forgotten by the dev team, my credit card failed to process one month. Support was not interested in helping me. Not at all. Ended up having to move my team's workflow off Zoho. I had been begging them to bill my card, but they just kept sending me generic emails asking me to try again. Phone support was even less helpful.
gala8y 6y ago
Preceding comment like this with OT goes a long way.

Reinmar 6y ago

We went with OT five years ago in CKEditor 5 and we have the same experience. While it would be tempting to try CRDT, it seems to come with too significant tradeoffs in our scenario. My colleague wrote down our thoughts in https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri.... The other aspect of CRDT that's in some scary is what @mdpye explains in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621113. With OT, if we get the corner cases right, we can tune and extend the implementation. With CRDT that might be game over.