check out TogetherJS

[jancborchardt]

Maybe something to look into for collaboration: https://togetherjs.com
cc @kossebau @thz @VicDeo @karlitschek @butonic

[karlitschek]

I saw this too. Indeed interesting.
The audio and chat features are nice.
We should finally do our WebRTC Skype killer app ;-)

[jancborchardt]

cc'ing @arky of Mozilla because he just told me he wanted to bring this up as well. ;)

[arky]

+1

This would be a good feature to have.

[kossebau]

It would be surely interesting for WebODF to have a TogetherJS backend plugin as well, yes, would welcome code for that ;)
But as this is discussed here in scope of OwnCloud Documents, there is the requirement of being limited to PHP. And possibly not being able to do websockets, or does OwnCloud have support for websockets in the server setups as minimal requirement?

https://togetherjs.com/docs/: "The bare minimum that we've identified for TogetherJS is WebSocket support."

And the reference hub is implemented to run on nodejs. So would need some work on OwnCloud server side.
Currently TogetherJs would be just another communication channel. Not sure there is that much to gain. Besides another dependency and having to keep up with its changes. RTC will be nice to have, but that first needs some proper UX ideas how to integrate that. TogetherJS is a possible solution, but only for the right problems ;)

[karlitschek]

No. Unfortunately ownCloud has the design goal to run on any webspace that supports PHP. But there are PHP websocket servers that could be used.

[thz]

relevant quote from the TogetherJS documentation to understand the relation:

WebRTC is available for audio chat, but is not otherwise used. We are often asked about this, as WebRTC offers data channels that allow browsers to send data directly to other browsers without a server. Unfortunatley you still need a server to establish the connection (the connection strings to connect browsers are quite unwieldy), it only supports one-to-one connections, and that support is limited to only some browsers and browser versions. Also establishing the connection is significantly slower than Web Sockets. But maybe someday.

WebRTC might be necessary for latency critical applications like audio and video streaming, but for exchanging edit-operations a central hub which can coordinate a global operation sequencing is still required. TogetherJS provides a central hub without any persistence - it does pure message passing. In the future WebODF might be smart enough to build reliable convergence on top of pure decentral logic. But that needs some work and right now I do not see what we could gain from TogherJS.

[ghost]

I’m closing this issue because it has been inactive for a few months. This probably means that it is not reproducible or it has been fixed in a newer version. If it’s an enhancement and hasn’t been taken on for so long, then it seems no one has the time to implement this.

Please reopen if you still encounter this issue with the latest stable version and then please use the issue template. You can also contribute directly by providing a patch – see the developer manual. :)

Thank you!