Keywords: distributed, decentralized, collaborative, real-time editor, network of browsers
CRATE is a real-time distributed and decentralized CollaboRATive Editor running directly in web browsers.
The online demo is available. First, make sure your browser is WebRTC compatible.
CRATEv1 aims to enable collaborative editing anywhere, at any time, whatever the number of participants, without a third party. Compared to Google Docs, (i) CRATE does not limit the number of simultaneous users, (ii) CRATE does not rely on service providers, thus your documents belong to you and whom you trust, (iii) CRATE does not include all text editing capabilities.
CRATEv2 is in the goal of making CRATE more user-friendly with enhanced formatting options. CRATEv2 add capabilities of modern collaborative editors using QUILL editor. Therefore, all the basic text formatting options are now supported. Moreover, the images from the web via copy past or directly from user to user (small sizes < 25Kb). The equations are supported also using KaTeX. Beside this, a basic commenting system is added to the editor, to support more interaction between the editors (online demo).
CRATEv2 is still in its very early stage of development. Therefore, the application may be buggy. Also, even basic functionalities are not implemented yet. Feel free to request functionalities, report issues, and ask questions.
Check our online demo in the following link: link, then you should see in top menu Guide me!, just click on it, and follow the steps.
The CRATE editor is mainly developed by GDD team, LINA, Nantes University.
The first version of CRATE is developed within two research projects: The CominLabs project DESCENT and the ANR project SocioPlug.
The second version of CRATE is developed within the research project: Web of Browsers.
[1] Nédelec, B., Molli, P., Mostefaoui, A., & Desmontils, E. (2013, September). LSEQ: an adaptive structure for sequences in distributed collaborative editing. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Document engineering (pp. 37-46). ACM.
[2] Nédelec, B., Molli, P., Mostefaoui, A., & Desmontils, E. (2013). Concurrency effects over variable-size identifiers in distributed collaborative editing. In Document Changes: Modeling, Detection, Storage and Visualization (Vol. 1008, pp. 0-7).
[3] Nédelec, B., Tanke, J., Frey, D., Molli, P., Mostefaoui, A. (2015). Spray, an Adaptive Random Peer Sampling Protocol. Technical Report.