Collaborative Editors and Whiteboards

Imagine multiple people editing the same document or drawing on a whiteboard simultaneously. How do their changes appear instantly to everyone else?

This lesson explores the architectural patterns and challenges behind building such multi-user, real-time collaborative applications using WebSockets.

The core problem in collaborative systems is state synchronization. If two users edit the same part of a document at the same time, whose change takes precedence?

• User A types 'Hello'.
• User B types 'Hi'.
• How do we merge these without losing data or creating inconsistencies?

Traditional request-response models aren't suitable for this constant, bidirectional flow of updates.