GSoC 2020 with SCoRe Lab — Week 10
tl;dr — This is the eleventh article of my journey into the Google Summer of Code with SCoRe Lab. Here I discuss the week ten (13th to 19th of July) of my GSoC experience.
As I discussed in the earlier post, we had to work on collaborative real-time authoring content. So we explored the CodiMd open-source tool. However, there was a little hiccup since CodiMd was written to use MySQL or PostgreSQL as the backend. And what we want to do is have a Firebase Real-Time Database as the backend for the real-time note authoring since going back and forth from MySQL relational database to Firebase Real-Time Database is a real pain and it is costly. So what we needed to do was to find a library or a platform that will use Firebase RTDB as the backend. So we explored the internet and looked for any suitable candidates.
Firepad comes to the rescue
Firepad is a collaborative text editor which is written by original Firebasers who wrote Firebase, and they know what’s up 😁. So we decided to use this library for our CodeLabz platform as well. First, we have to convert this library for our use case.
Firepad uses Firebase Real-Time Database as the backend and it supports rich text editing with CodeMirror and code editing via Ace. So this fits exactly for our purposes. Voila.
Firepad documentation is very well written and easy to understand, so to customize Firepad for our purposes is going to be easy. In the coming weeks, I will be customizing the functionality behind the Firepad to fit our ReactJS application, since it is written for a simple vanilla HTML, JavaScript web pages. So until we meet again, happy coding…
