Real-Time Collaborative Text Editor

A simple real-time collaborative text editor built with Go, WebSockets, and Redis. This application allows multiple users to edit the same text document simultaneously, with changes reflected in real-time across all connected clients.

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Features

• Real-time collaborative editing using WebSockets.
• Supports concurrent edits with basic conflict resolution.
• UTF-8 encoding support for international characters (including Polish characters).
• Simple and clean user interface.
• Written in Go with a minimal set of dependencies.
• Unit tests using Given-When-Then structure and Testify assertions.

Running the Application

With Docker

Build and Start Services

docker-compose up --build

This command will build the Go application image and start both the application and Redis services.

Usage

• Open http://localhost:8080/ in multiple browser windows or tabs.
• Start typing in the text area. Your changes will be reflected in real-time across all connected clients.
• The application supports inserting and deleting text with basic conflict resolution.

Details

• Server:

  • Built with Go.
  • Uses net/http for serving HTTP requests.
  • Uses github.com/gorilla/websocket for WebSocket connections.
  • Uses github.com/go-redis/redis/v8 for Redis client.
  • Manages connected clients and broadcasts edits via WebSockets.

• Client:

  • Written in HTML and JavaScript. (not the best, nor the worst, just not doing much front-end)
  • Establishes a WebSocket connection to receive real-time updates.
  • Sends edits to the server via HTTP POST requests.
  • Uses a unique clientId to prevent applying its own edits multiple times.

• Data Flow:

  • Edits: When a user makes a change, the client calculates the difference and sends an edit to the server.
  • Server Processing: The server applies the edit to its text state and broadcasts the edit to all connected clients.
  • Client Update: Clients receive the edit via WebSocket and apply it to their local text area.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.