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0 pointspcl2y ago0 comments

Cool, thanks for the details.

So if I smoosh everything in my sorta “collaboration context” together into one document, are there any provisions for delta updates on the wire? Your browser-side storage format sounds like it’s compatible with that approach, but what about clients that are far apart version-wise? Are you storing full relay history and also a snapshot?

I see in your format docs [0] that you store change chunks. Are these exposed in the API for atomicity at all? Are there any atomicity guaranties?

And you discuss backends, but I don’t see any pointers to an S3 or Postgres implementation. Is that something you’re keeping closed source for your business model, or am I just missing something?

I haven’t found anything about authorization. Have you done any work there? I quite like the Firebase model in which you can write simple validation rules that can evaluate against the document itself —- “only allow users who are listed in path `members` to write to this document” or whatever.

[0] https://automerge.org/automerge-binary-format-spec/#chunk-co...

0 comments

pvh2y ago

The sync protocol does indeed calculate the delta between peers and efficiently catches both sides up.

The backends you see are the ones I use, but the API is a binary blob key value store with range queries: supporting other stores should be straightforward.

Authentication isn’t exactly left as an exercise to the reader but is an area of active work. I would say securing access to a URL via whatever mechanism you’re used to should be fine for client server applications and peer to peer folk seem to mostly have their own ideas.

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