Enriching single-user web applications non-invasively with shared editing support

•We propose a transformation approach allowing to non-invasively incorporate shared editing capabilities in existing single-user web applications.•We report on a user study with 30 subjects assessing collaboration qualities in joint work scenarios leveraging two converted editors.•We carve out characteristics web applications have to expose in order to adopt the generic transformation approach.

Collaborative real-time applications like Google Docs allow multiple users to edit the very same document simultaneously which supersedes traditional document merging and document locking techniques. However, developing collaborative web applications is a time-consuming and complex endeavor since it requires implementing document synchronization and conflict resolution services. To accelerate the development of collaborative web applications, we present a rapid transformation approach allowing to non-invasively introduce shared editing capabilities into existing single-user web applications. Instead of changing the application's source code, our non-invasive approach leverages a generic collaboration infrastructure that requires only a configuration to provide document synchronization and conflict resolution services. Hence, the effort to incorporate shared editing capabilities is considerably reduced in contrast to conventional approaches where the use of a programing library entails scattered source code changes. Moreover, we report on the results of a user study demonstrating that converted editors are convenient for collaborative work.