pjfontillas / sharejs

Collaborative editing in any app

ShareJS

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You are looking at the 0.7 alpha branch of ShareJS.

For the stable 0.6 branch that you will get if you npm install share, look in the 0.6 branch.

ShareJS 0.7 is a complete rewrite of ShareJS 0.6. Most APIs have changed, at least slightly. Motivation for the new design is discussed in a blog post here and I demo the new features here.

A list of changes from 0.6 is here.

Welcome. So you know, this code is feature incomplete. The API and the code are unstable, and there are known bugs. Test coverage has dropped from 90% in ShareJS 0.6 to around 50% and documentation of the new APIs is largely nonexistant.

The documentation below is also full of lies. If you want to play with the new version of ShareJS anyway, look at the examples in prototype/.

I understand that if you're using racer & derby, you will use this code anyway despite my warnings. If you run into issues, please file issues so I can fix them.

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This is a little server (& client library) to allow concurrent editing of any kind of content. The server runs on NodeJS and the client works in NodeJS or a web browser.

ShareJS currently supports operational transform on plain-text and arbitrary JSON data.

Immerse yourself in API Documentation.

Visit Google groups for discussions and announcements

Check out the live interactive demos.

Browser support

ShareJS should work with all browsers, down to IE5.5 (although IE support hasn't been tested with the new version).

That said, I only test regularly with FF, Safari and Chrome, and occasionally with IE8+. File bug reports if you have issues

Installing and running

# npm install [email protected]

The examples haven't been ported to the new API yet

Run the examples with:

# sharejs-exampleserver

ShareJS depends on LiveDB for its database backend, which currently requires redis. Your data doesn't actually have to live in redis - its just used as an operation cache, fast STM-style lock and pubsub system.

Run the tests:

# npm install
# mocha

Running a server

This documentation is out of date!

There are two ways to run a sharejs server:

1. Embedded in a node.js server app:

   var connect = require('connect'),
       sharejs = require('share').server;
   
   var server = connect(
         connect.logger(),
         connect.static(__dirname + '/my_html_files')
       );
   
   var options = {db: {type: 'none'}}; // See docs for options. {type: 'redis'} to enable persistance.
   
   // Attach the sharejs REST and Socket.io interfaces to the server
   sharejs.attach(server, options);
   
   server.listen(8000);
   console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/');

   The above script will start up a ShareJS server on port 8000 which hosts static content from the my_html_files directory. See bin/exampleserver for a more complex configuration example.

   See the Connect or Express documentation for more complex routing.

2. From the command line:

    # sharejs
   

   Configuration is pulled from a configuration file that can't be easily edited at the moment. For now, I recommend method #1 above.

3. If you are just mucking around, run:

    # sharejs-exampleserver
   

   This will run a simple server on port 8000, and host all the example code there. Run it and check out http://localhost:8000/ . The example server stores everything in ram, so don't get too attached to your data.

   If you're running sharejs from source, you can launch the example server by running bin/exampleserver.

Putting Share.js on your website

If you want to get a simple editor working in your webpage with sharejs, here's what you need to do:

First, get an ace editor on your page:

<div id="editor"></div>

Your web app will need access to the following JS files:

• Ace (http://ace.ajax.org/)
• Browserchannel
• ShareJS client and ace bindings.

Add these script tags:

<script src="http://ajaxorg.github.com/ace/build/src/ace.js"></script>
<script src="/channel/bcsocket.js"></script>
<script src="/share/share.js"></script>
<script src="/share/ace.js"></script>

And add this code:

<script>
    var editor = ace.edit("editor");

    sharejs.open('hello', 'text', function(error, doc) {
        doc.attach_ace(editor);
    });
</script>

NOTE: If you're using the current version in npm (0.4) or earler, the argument order is the other way around (function(doc, error)).

Thats about it :)

The easiest way to get your code running is to check sharejs out from source and put your html and css files in the examples/ directory. Run bin/exampleserver to launch the demo server and browse to http://localhost:8000/your-app.html .

See the wiki for documentation.

Its also possible to use sharejs without ace. See the textarea example for details.

Writing a client using node.js

The client API is the same whether you're using the web or nodejs.

Here's an example application which opens a document and inserts some text in it. Every time an op is applied to the document, it'll print out the document's version.

Run this from a couple terminal windows when sharejs is running to see it go.

var client = require('share').client;

// Open the 'hello' document, which should have type 'text':
client.open('hello', 'text', 'http://localhost:8000/sjs', function(error, doc) {
    // Insert some text at the start of the document (position 0):
    doc.insert("Hi there!\n", 0);

    // Get the contents of the document for some reason:
    console.log(doc.snapshot);

    doc.on('change', function(op) {
        console.log('Version: ' + doc.version);
    });

    // Close the doc if you want your node app to exit cleanly
    // doc.close();
});

NOTE: If you're using the current version in npm (0.4) or earler, the argument order is the other way around (function(doc, error)).

See the wiki for API documentation, and examples/node* for some more example apps.