canop

Transport-agnostic operation-rich client-server JSON synchronization protocol.

Pros

• Operational Transformations minimizes the number of UI operations at the cost of tremendous implementation complexity that rises exponentially with the number of operations it supports.
• CRDTs tend to use a lot of memory, and require tricky garbage collection to avoid bloat. Canop does not suffer from memory bloat. Canonical operations are immutable, and so, can be substituted for the equivalent string. CRDTs are, however, ideal for peer-to-peer synchronization.
• Rebase-sync requires local changes to be rebased by changes that the server has accepted, similar to our design. However, it denies changes that are not rebased, causing the potential for long-term divergence if changes happen faster than a client-server round-trip. Canop operations are immediately rebased and accepted by the server.

Cons

Out of the box, Canop does not support peer-to-peer editing. It would require adding a consensus algorithm to determine the form of canonical operations.