Collaborative real-time editor

A collaborative real-time editor is a type of collaborative software or web application which enables real-time collaborative editing, simultaneous editing, or live editing of the same digital document, or cloud-stored data – such as an online spreadsheet, word processing document, database or presentation – at the same time by different users on different computers or mobile devices, with automatic and nearly instantaneous merging of their edits. Real-time editing performs automatic, periodic, often nearly instantaneous synchronization of edits of all online users as they edit the document on their own device. This is designed to avoid or minimize edit conflicts. With asynchronous collaborative editing (i.e. non-real-time, delayed or offline), each user must typically manually submit (publish, push or commit), update (refresh, pull, download or sync) and (if any edit conflicts occur) merge their edits. Due to the delayed nature of asynchronous collaborative editing, multiple users can end up editing the same line, word, element, data, row or field resulting in edit conflicts which require manual edit merging or overwriting, requiring the user to choose which edits to use or (depending on the system and setup) automatically overwriting their edits or other people's edits, with or without a warning. The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear. A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology. It allowed real-time editing of a single document by multiple users over a LAN and relied on a workgroup server. Interest in real-time collaborative editing over the internet led to the development of MoonEdit and SubEthaEdit in the 2003-2005 time frame, followed soon after by Gobby. With the introduction of Ajax technology and the "content editable" function in browsers, web-based collaborative editing in real-time developed as part of the Web 2.