Web-based collaborative editing

Question

I want to develop a web-based collaborative editing app: basically many users will transcribe a big mp3. The first step is to write a specification.

It seems pretty easy to do it with async communication and javascript, keeping track of the transcription an user gives and forwarding it to other users editing the same file, but I fear I might be underestimating the problem: what are the common issues this kind of problem raises?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You didn't specify what browsers you want to support. To do it "real-time", you can either poll the server or use Comet or WebSocket (for browsers that support it) or Flash net Socket. As with any collaborative app, I think the hardest problem is conflict resolution/keeping all sessions synchronized.

You might be interested in reading Google Wave Protocol too. It's a white paper on real-time collaborative document editing. Not for the faint of heart :D