ACE (editor)

ACE - a collaborative editor is a collaborative real-time text editor.

Introduction

ACE allows multiple persons, a text document common, that is at the same time to process ( more Authorship). Each person works with the ACE Editor to its own computer. All nodes are connected via a network ( LAN, Internet) and see at all times the same document content. If anyone of the group makes a change in the document ( for example, writes that the word ' signature ' at the end of the document ), it is displayed in real time and synchronized to all other users. Each user is able to keep track of the changes in the document and can keep track of who has what, where, edited the document. This is supported by different text - background colors for each participant in an edit session (see chart).

ACE automatically detects all users on the local subnet (see Bonjour technology). The required documents can be published to the common editing. The owner of the document can then invite the user to edit.

ACE is distributed as free software in source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License ( GPL). It runs on the Java run -time environment, which is available for all major operating systems such as Windows or various Unix derivatives (Linux, Mac OS X, ... ) are available.

Example

User Steve edited together with Scott and Bill a document called ' Collaboration.txt '. Steve is the owner of the document. In the ' Participants' window at the top right Steve sees which users miteditieren and their background color. So he realizes exactly who wrote what. Steve's background color is blue. If the user now Bill writes something that Steve can read at the same time, what Bill edited by observing its cursor. In ' Users' window at the bottom right all known users in the same subnet are automatically listed. It is also possible to work with a user over the Internet. In the ' browse' window at the bottom left all public documents are displayed, which are documents that have been shared by other users on the shared editing. Steve can now click on one of these documents, and if the owner of the document agrees, they can edit the document together.

Applications

ACE for example, enables the following functionality:

• Collaborative brainstorming more persons
• Common writing notes at a conference,
• Collaborative writing of program code ( XP),
• Educational purposes ( for schools, for example, two students jointly write an essay ).

An interesting application of ACE is to use for learning purposes in schools. For example, groups of two to three students can write an essay together. They train each other to get to respectively apply the written language better. Firstly, the students learn to write and on the other they experience a playful use of the computer.

Technology

A collaborative real-time editing system such as ACE has the following requirements:

A collaborative editing system can consist of n instances, corresponding to simple n users that have the system running on your computer and which are interconnected by a network. The biggest challenge in a collaborative editing system is the consistency of a document, because if the document replicas would diverge, this would no longer be identical and thus the editing useless as such.

A collaborative editing system must have the following properties, so it is considered to be consistent.

In order to achieve this consistency property, there is consistency algorithms. Such algorithms consist of two parts: the concurrency control algorithm and the Operational transformation functions. These two mechanisms are from the research field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW short.