Trying to understand this help doc. It says:
The Realtime API provides a persistent document for the data that users are collaborating on.
What is this "persistent document"? Is this a file in Google Drive? I'm not planning to store data in Google Drive and most likely will be using shortcut files. So how does that relate to my situation?
Applications that provide collaborative editing features, but need to work with files in various formats, must adopt one or more strategies for converting data between the Realtime API document and other file formats.
I'm storing my data as XML in database. Does this qualify for "files in various formats"? How does that effect my situation?