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I'm wondering if it's feasible to utilize Google Drive to perform real-time syncing of custom documents between different users on different devices (Android, iOS, web, etc). What I'm talking about is similar to the real-time collaboration capabilities of Google Docs (which was added as a result of the work on Google Wave I believe), but with a custom document format.

For example, a user would manipulate data in a document on an Android app, and those changes would show up in real-time (or close to it) in another user's Android or web app that they've shared the original document with.

Is this something that Google Drive and the Google Drive SDK are designed to handle?

ashughes
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You will have to use your own logic for this. The complexity here is to push real time changes and do it in an efficient maner, so you would probably only send diffs of the file or even better send operational transformations to connected clients which is not trivial to do. Google Drive is simply for storage of entire file so in your case you would use it to store the aggregated result of all of the concurrent edits.

Technically, for the web app, you would likely have to use web-sockets or long-polling techniques or polling frequently (and I can't help you for Android on this one).

If you are interested I would start by reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

Nicolas Garnier
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  • Thanks Nivco. I will definitely look into operational transformation. So, are the real-time aspects of Google Docs (multiple people editing the same document in real-time) separate from Google Drive? – ashughes Apr 27 '12 at 20:53