Gobby

Description

Gobby features a client-server architecture which supports multiple documents in one session, document synchronisation on request, password protection and an IRC-like chat for communication out of band. Users can choose a colour to highlight the text they have written in a document. Gobby is fully Unicode-aware, provides syntax highlighting for most programming languages, and has basic Zeroconf support.

A dedicated server called Sobby is also provided, together with a script which could format saved sessions for the web (e.g. to provide logs of meetings with a collaboratively prepared transcript). The collaborative editing protocol is named Obby, and there are other implementations that use this protocol (e.g. Rudel, a plugin for GNU Emacs). Gobby 0.5 replaces Sobby with a new server called infinoted.

Version 0.4.0 featured fully encrypted connections and further usability enhancements. Users have commented versions prior to 0.5.0 had some issues.

Versions numbered 0.4.9x are preview releases for version 0.5.0. The most noticeable improvement is undo support, using the adOPTed algorithm for concurrency control.

Criticisms

While offering Unicode support it has been suggested the product is suitable for producing plaintext rather than formatted documents.

References

References

1. Brockmeier, Joe. (2006-07-11). "Collaborative text editing with Gobby".
2. Kereki, Federico. (2007-09-24). "Group text editing with Gobby".
3. "Setting up a dedicated server to host EOS Sessions {{!}} Tutorial".
4. (2014-10-23). "Rudel".
5. Mouw, Evert. (2010-12-27). "Working together on text and source code with Gobby and infinoted".
6. Trentini, Andrea. (1 January 2013). "Three years of teaching using collaborative tools: patterns and lessons learned". University of Milan.
7. Kochedykova, Tatiana. "5 open source alternatives to Google Docs".
8. "What is Gobby?".
9. "root/COPYING".
10. "news".
11. "Infinoted".
12. "What is Gobby?".
13. "Infinote protocol".