The generic editor is a way for people to collaborate over a document, exchange ideas, and write notes using markdown.
- Drag and drop file upload
- Syntax highlighting
- LaTeX support
- node.js is a major component in implementing generic editor, from the hosting the static files to running the collaborative service.
- The website for generic editor is hosted on a Google Cloud Compute Engine that hosts our nginx server which acts as a reverse proxy for our express webapp and our WebSocket server.
- Using multer we created an ingest server for images that were uploaded using the drag and drop functionality.
- This was done by creating a custom storage engine for multer that used the @google-cloud/storage package to upload binary data to our Google Cloud Storage Bucket.
- Allowing users to collaborate on the same document was achieved using an operational transformation algorithm implemented by ShareDB.
- Through WebSockets we were able to sync operations between a central server and multiple clients.
- Finally, the markdown editor uses MathJax to render LaTeX, and markdown-it to render the markdown.
We hope to more closely integrate our platform with Google Cloud, namely writing a database wrapper for ShareDB that interfaces with Google Firestore. This will allow us achieve our goal of moving our entire stack onto the free tier for the Google Cloud Platform.
Warning: The demo is NOT MODERATED.