Yjs: A Framework for Near Real-Time P2P Shared Editing on Arbitrary Data Types

Near real-time shared editing of documents in the Web browser has become popular for many applications like text writing, drawing, sketching and others. These applications require protocols for exchanging messages among user agents and for resolving editing conflicts. The available frameworks mostly rely on operational transformation approaches and often expose drawbacks like failing to scale, restriction to linear data structures and client-server architectures. In this paper we present Yjs, a lightweight open-source JavaScript framework that can be used for collaborative editing of arbitrary data types in peer-to-peer settings. The framework is based on a new operational transformation-like approach and supports communication protocols like XMPP and WebRTC. From an engineering perspective Yjs is easy to integrate into Web applications. Evaluations show that it has a favorable runtime complexity.