Automerge: Replicated Data Structures for Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

A talk at LADIS, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK, 27 Jul 2018

• Slides

Invited talk at 11th ACM SIGOPS Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS).

Abstract

This talk introduces Automerge, a JavaScript library for data synchronisation between mobile devices such as laptop computers and smartphones. It allows users to read and modify data even while their device is offline, and it automatically merges changes made concurrently on different devices. Unlike most existing data synchronisation systems, Automerge does not require data to be sent via a centralised server, but rather allows local and peer-to-peer networks to be used. We show how this project spans the gamut from the theory of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and formal verification, all the way to implementing collaborative applications that use these data structures.