solitaryreaper / cs739-project Goto Github PK

CollabDraw
==========

Project Proposal Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLoCjye_Yg1iWLO1RrQlO_94_mYPU-6l8tQfFApqea0/edit

The idea is to create a collaborative real-time drawing board. Multiple users can make change to the same board at the same time and all the changes would be propagated to all the client instantly. 

The aspect of the distributed systems that we intend to explore with this project are :
1) Real-time synchronization of data.
Whenever a client makes a change on its local canvas, this change is propagated to a live server which broadcasts it to all the clients connected to a specific session.

2) Network latency in distributed systems.
How much time does it take for real-time synchronization in a distributed system for a simple application?

3) Fault-tolerance.
What happens if the backend-server is down? To avoid that scenario, sync all the changes to failover servers too. When
the primary server is down, direct all the real-time synchronization requests to the failover server.

4) Disconnected operations.
What if none of the backend servers are up and running ? The client should still be able to do operations locally which
should be merged with the backend servers when they are up again and broadcast to all the clients.

5) Conflict resolution
If two clients have modified the same canvas in conflicting ways, how to do the conflict resolution to achieve consistent
state ? This can be done using a technique called Operational Transformation.