A Hybrid FSM Rule-Based Approach for the Real-Time Control of Web-Based Collaborative Platforms
Cristian Gadea, Bogdan Emanuel Ionescu, Dan Dominic Ionescu · 2018
Web-based collaborative platforms and co-editing tools are now vital components of modern organizations seeking to enhance team productivity and efficiency. Although the underlying optimistic consistency maintenance techniques for keeping content synchronized across multiple sites have been studied by researchers since the eighties, no investigations currently exist that apply the principles of control theory and Finite State Machines (FSMs) to model the real-time distributed system behavior. Such modeling is important to enable the next generation of collaborative web-based experiences, which can increasingly benefit from real-time synchronization of complex hierarchical content such as HTML. So far no approaches can preserve the user's intentions when capturing any change made to the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) in a way efficient for sending and replaying on another browser. What is needed is a way of observing and encoding all possible changes made to a web page's DOM in such a way that they can be transmitted to other users as a feedback signal via a central server. This paper will apply a real-time feedback control mechanism to develop a Web-Based Collaborative Platform based on a new Operation Transformation (OT) algorithm. Operations are deduced by executing a series of rules and by using a Virtual DOM (VDOM) to ensure that operations can be re-integrated by receiving users, where transformation rules are applied. The feedback mechanisms are demonstrated by modeling and simulating the components using FSMs, which are optimally combined with the Rule-Based approach such that real-time deadlines are observed.