I’m working on a web platform using Vaadin and Google Web Toolkit. I want to add a feature that lets users work together on text documents in real-time, kind of like Google Docs. The tricky part is that our users don’t have Google accounts, and we’d prefer to keep it that way.
Does anyone know of a good way to add this kind of collaborative document editing to our app? I’ve looked into embedding Google Docs directly, but that seems to require Google accounts. Are there any alternatives that could work well with our Vaadin setup?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions or experiences you can share. Thanks a bunch for your help!
I’ve encountered a similar challenge before. Rather than integrating Google Docs, we implemented Etherpad, an open-source solution that works well with Vaadin without needing external accounts.
Etherpad’s API made it easy to embed a real-time editor into our Vaadin components. The real-time synchronization is managed internally, which saved us from handling the complexities ourselves. Although you’ll need to host the Etherpad server, this approach gives you full control over your data and user management, providing a robust in-house solution.
I’ve actually tackled this issue in a previous project. We ended up using Firepad, which is built on Firebase. It integrates smoothly with Vaadin and doesn’t require Google accounts.
The real-time collaboration features in Firepad are top-notch, and it’s pretty straightforward to implement. You’ll need to set up a Firebase project, but that’s fairly simple. The main advantage is that you retain control over user authentication and data storage.
One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to handle conflict resolution carefully. We ran into some issues with simultaneous edits, but once we ironed those out, it worked like a charm. The community support is also quite helpful if you run into any snags during implementation.
hey dude, have u looked into CKEditor? it’s pretty sweet for collab editing. i used it in a vaadin project once and it worked like a charm. no google accounts needed, and u can customize it to fit ur app’s style. might be worth checkin out!