GitLab Incubation Engineering, 25 May 2022

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Real-time updates of issue descriptions – Update 25-05-2022

Description

This is the first update for the The Real-time Editing of Issue Descriptions (REID) Single Engineer Group (SEG):

Checkout this GitLab handbook page for more details: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/real-time-collaboration/

The released y-rb gem can be found on RubyGems: https://rubygems.org/gems/y-rb

A

Hey folks, my name is hannes, and I am the single engineering group for real-time editing of issue descriptions.

A

This is the first update, so I'm super excited to talk a bit more about what I'm up to the vision for real-time editing at gitlab is that it should be super easy to just collaborate in real time on anything that you're doing on the platform in order to get there. We start with issue descriptions so in the future you can expect to go to an issue. Description start editing it and if someone else who is also assigned to that issue wants to collaborate with you on that tax.

A

Can't just do that by joining your by joining the collaborative editing session. In order to get there, we have to lay a bit of like foundational groundwork before we can actually achieve that. I have created this handbook page that talks a bit more about the technical details and implications on how to get there.

A

I have started to work on the foundations, but it's not the first thing that has been built at gitlab for real-time collaboration. We actually have a websocket or maintain websocket connections between clients and the server in order to transmit real-time updates between the server and the client.

A

This works today for issue labels. So as soon as you add a label to an issue and there's another person editing the same issue, they will see the issue being updated on the right side.

A

Sadly, though, this alone does not help in the case of text, editing problems or actually anything that can produce a conflict even labels to get there. We need to work with something that allows us to have conflict-free editing between more two or more clients.

A

There's a lot of potential solutions out there, and one of the most popular ones is operational transformation, which is also used by google docs. What we are going to end up using, though, is crdts, which stands for conflict for conflict-free replicated data types.

A

Those data types allow us to have a simple structure like an array, a map or a string on one client and have an instance of that on any you know one or more other clients, and as soon as we have a change, we transmit the change to the other client where it is merged, instantaneously and conflict-free.

A

So you can think about this, as if you type an I type at the same time, eventually, it will converge towards a single text document that looks exactly the same on both of our machines: that's the magic of crdts.

A

Luckily, someone has done the research on crdts long before this project has started, and that is kevin yan's and the ygs and ycrdt group. We have teamed up with them in order to bring ygs, which is by far the most popular cdt implementation on the front-end side, to create why ruby, a chan that allows us to be fully interoperable with the ygs front-end on our server side.

A

This is literally. This was literally step one and what it's kind of like to follow up next is the actual usage of the jam in our stack. To do that, we have to do our home. We have to do a bit more of a bit more homework.

A

It's not clear right now how we can instantiate collaborative editing sessions. That concept does not exist today. We know how collaborative editing works, but in only in an async way for real time there might be a few implications to our user interfaces. The same is true for mutations.

A

We currently can only receive updates in real time, but we cannot send them there's there are ways to to to overcome those limitations, but they need to be flashed out and built first.

A

So that's the update for this week and I hope to see you soon. Bye, bye,.