Extensible Conflict-Free Replicated Datatypes for Real-time Collaborative Software Engineering

Real-time collaboration has become a prominent feature of nowadays' software engineering practices. Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDT) offer an efficient and robust mechanism for implementing real-time collaborative environments. CRDT frameworks provide generic data types tool builders have to customize and extend when developing domains-specific model editors. However, extensibility has not been addressed by current CRDT frameworks as a primary objective so far. Furthermore, the data types provided by mainstream CRDT frameworks are primarily geared towards linear data, such as text, and fall short of supporting the complex data types typically used in domain-specific modeling, such as graphs. In this paper, we report our results in augmenting primitive CRDT with extension mechanisms. We demonstrate our technique in our prototype collaborative framework.