Wolfgang Sommergut found SynchroEdit an open-source browser-based simultaneous multiuser editor. But unfortunately the Demo seemed broken when I tried it out, so I started to look for alternatives.
And alternatives I should find: Wikipedia has an article, that although sparse on content contains links to seemingly every collaborative editor there is. JotSpot Live is a hosted application that works (I actually tried the free plan) on Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not Opera. It once told me it lost it’s connection while I was typing on IE, but apart from that it seem slick, stable, WEB 2.0 like.
There’s also LivePad, a Mozilla only browser based rich editor, that’s free as in speech and works flawless, but takes quite some processor power.
Because i couldn’t find any really mind-blowing web applications, I decided to give standalone applications a look. Although there are two working, free solutions, I’ll ignore MoonEdit and just describe my experience with the better looking, cross-platform Gobby, because Gobby is what the developers of the great game Clonk use.
After some initial work to get Gobby running on Windows (you have to download and install GTK support packages), Gobby itself is a great piece of work. Editing works smooth and changes are visible immideatelly. Furthermore multiple documents, syntax highlighting (even for Ruby) and a seperate chat during the editing process are supported.
All in all I have to say, whenever possible I’d use Gobby, because it’s simply ten times more powerful then it’s web based equivalents, and free.
If I’d to go with a Web Application I’d choose the non-free JotSpot, because it supports many different browsers and just works out of the box.
So he went on and patched ERB so that it supported escaping of ampersands (by prefixing them with a \) and till yesterday that seemed like the Ruby like solution to my. But then I woke up today and everything seemed clear.
I was a fool. Not only did I completely ignore the potential security breach (XSS) that was introduced by essentially removing html_escape’s teeth, but I also neglected to see the really Rails like solution.
Rails is based on many principles that sound like buzzwords, but in fact aren’t. Convention over configuration is one of them, and it means that there’s always one favoured way to do something. And for his problem this way is replacing the < with a plain old <:
Yesterday I went from some revision I never cared to remember to the new and shiny 762. But not everything went smooth. While the svn update worked perfectly, the migrations simpley kept on failing. I even considered looking at the SQL for myself, but thankfully I rerun them once again, and voila, everything worked. This is a documented bug, but no fix is available as of now and why my “solution” worked is incomprehensible to me. (Also, I didn’t investigate)
Even considering all these bugs Typo is still the best blogging software around (not only because it’s written in Rails) and I’ll happily keep on playing beta testing guinea pig.
Although they amongst others feature a rendering of the AIDS virus and some people seem to object to that, I can’t help but admire this great design and the message it carries: The future (as the past) belongs to science and progress! Yay!
