Collaborative Editing in Jupyter Notebooks

Hi!

Kevin Jahns

Open Source Developer​ & Freelancer

> I work to make the web more collaborative

kevin.jahns@pm.me

https://github.com/yjs/yjs

Yjs is a framework and ecosystem for building collaborative applications

@dmonad

@kevin_jahns

What is collaborative editing?

Desirable Properties:

Text

Past efforts

• 2013-now: Google Colab / Colaboratory based on the Google Realtime Engine, which is now deprecated.
• 2013-now: CoCalc by William Stein.
• 2015-2017:  Google Realtime Integration. Brian Granger, Chris Colbert, and Ian Rose
• 2017: Chris Colbert wrote the Lumino CRDT.
• 2019:  Integration of the Lumino framework. Vidar Tonaas Fauske, Ian Rose, Saul Shanabrook
• 2021:  Integrate Yjs / Shared Model. Eric Charles, Carlos Herrero, and Kevin Jahns

Blog: "How we made Jupyter notebooks collaborative with Yjs"

Jupyter Notebooks is collaborative!

 $ jupyter lab --collaborative

Problem 1: Concurrency

Insert(0, A)

Insert(0, B)

?

?

•   Insert(0, A) • Insert(0, B) = BA
•   Insert(0, B) • Insert(0, A) = AB

Solving Concurrency with Yjs

Y.Array([])

Y.Array(['B'])

Y.Array(['A'])

Insert(0, A)

Insert(0, B)

Y.Array(['A', 'B'])

• Yjs implements a CRDT - a mathematical model to merge concurrent actions.
• Fork and automatically merge data types.
• Commutative updates.

Shared Notebook Model (1)

@jupyterlab/shared-models
 

An easy-to-use API to manipulate Jupyter Notebooks

Documentation: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/extension/documents.htm

Shared Notebook Model (2)

An easy-to-use API to manipulate Jupyter Notebooks

@jupyterlab/shared-models
 

Documentation: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/extension/documents.htm

Shared Notebook Model (3)

An easy-to-use API to manipulate Jupyter Notebooks

@jupyterlab/shared-models
 

Documentation: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/extension/documents.htm

Shared Notebook Model (4)

An easy-to-use API to manipulate Jupyter Notebooks

@jupyterlab/shared-models
 

Documentation: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/extension/documents.htm

Problem 2: Keeping compatibility

Non-collaborative mode

Non-collaborative mode

Collaborative mode

Y CRDT Project

• https://github.com/yjs/y-crdt 

• Rust Implementation of the Yjs CRDT

• Language bindings to other languages

  • Python

  • C/C++

  • Java

  • PHP

  • WASM

  • ..

• Write a “Shared Model” for Python.

• Makes it possible to write a proper multi-user backend

Plans for 2022 / JupyterLab 4.0

• Collaborative editing is enabled by default
• More collaborative features:
  • Commenting
  • Chat
  • Version History

Thank you

Thank you

Sponsors

Sponsors