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Live Collaboration

1 post · Sep 2020

What this trail covers

Hex has evolved its collaborative editing capabilities by implementing a pragmatic approach to live collaboration using Atomic Operations (AO). This system breaks down all state mutations to single property updates, ensuring that operations of different types cannot conflict. A central authority manages a monotonically increasing counter per object to determine the 'last writer wins' in cases of same-type operation conflicts. This approach was chosen for its incremental shippability, compatibility with the existing stack (Apollo, GraphQL, TypeScript, PostgreSQL), and developer control over core application foundations.

All Hex trails
  1. A Pragmatic Approach to Live CollaborationThis post introduces and details the 'Atomic Operations' (AO) approach to implementing live multi-user editing in the Hex Logic View. AO decomposes state mutations to single property updates, preventing conflicts between different operation types. For same-type operations, a central server maintains a monotonic counter per object to resolve conflicts using a 'last writer wins' semantic. The implementation was designed to be incremental and compatible with Hex's existing stack (Apollo, GraphQL, TypeScript, PostgreSQL).