CoEdit Demo 

Overview

CoEdit is a simple demonstration program for the collaborative editing of text documents. The interface is similar to Windows notepad and supports repositories and interactive collaboration using Operational Transformation (OT).

CoEdit was originally developed in 2006 to investigate branching, tagging and merging using OT.

Versions

V1.0 features:

• Supports both on-line and off-line editing modes.
• Local operations are performed immediately irrespective of network latency.
• Remote operations are applied if and when they arrive.
• Late comers can connect and take part in the collaborative editing.
• A complex connection topology can be achieved because any CoEdit process can connect to any other.
• Performance is very good - can scale to many hundreds of users.

V2.0 features:

• Supports a repository that keeps track of any number of branches.
• The start or end of any branch can be checked out. The start of a branch can never change, and this serves the counterpart of a non-sticky tag. New edits can only be applied to the end of a branch.
• Users can commit (check-in) edits to the end of any branch.
• Branches can always be merged onto a given branch.
• Sticky merging of branches is supported. This means that future edits committed to one branch are automatically applied to another branch. Sticky merging is transitive.
• Interative editing can be performed independently on any branch. After checking out a branch a user can host a session and invite other uses to join the session and perform interactive editing of the text document. When the session is complete the original user that hosted the session can check-in the edits.

Walkthrough

This CoEdit Walkthrough illustrates the concepts of branching and merging, performing checkins on two branches as shown below. It also shows how real time collaboration fits neatly into the picture when Barney and Betty work interactively on branch 'bam'.

V1.0 Command line arguments

Version 1.0 of coedit.exe takes three command line arguments as follows

coedit S=port1 C=ipaddress:port2 N=name

where

• port1 designates a port number to listen on as a server
• ipaddress:port2 designates the IP address and port of a remote machine to which a connection will be made
• name identifies the person editing the shared text document

V2.0 Command line arguments

Real time editing

The simple interactive editing session available in V1.0 is now achieved with the following command line:

coedit IS=port1 IC=ipaddress:port2 N=name

where

• port1 designates a port number to listen on as a server
• ipaddress:port2 designates the IP address and port of a remote machine to which a connection will be made
• name identifies the person editing the shared text document

Repository server

A repository server is created using the RS command line switch, as follows:

coedit RS=port

where

• port designates a port number to listen on as a repository server

Repository client

A repository client is created using the RC command line switch, as follows:

coedit RC=host:port N=name

where

• host:port designates the IP address / host name and port number of a remote machine running a repository server
• name identifies the person editing the shared text document

Download

The download is a single zip file containing the executable and some additional dlls.

Version	Release Date	MD5	Size	Download
1.0	2 September 2006	35185C7913342E041D0715783651E63A	414044 bytes	coeditV1.0.zip
2.0	19 September 2006	F7ABDC2566D6969758F0032AC5208078	459298 bytes	coeditV2.0.zip

CoEdit is free for non-commercial use.

Supported platforms

• Win98
• Win2000
• WinXP

Disclaimer

This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of fitness for a purpose, or the warranty of non-infringement.