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 efficient mechanisms for implementing real-time collaborative environments. However, the lack of extensibility of CRDT limits their applicability. This is a particularly important problem in settings relying on complex, non-linear data types. In this paper, we report our results in augmenting primitive CRDT with extension mechanisms. We demonstrate our technique through an example from the realm of model-driven engineering, where graph types are prevalent.