John McLear JohnMcLear

From SocialCalc to EtherCalc

Previously, in The Architecture of Open Source Applications, I described SocialCalc, an in-browser spreadsheet system that replaced the server-centric WikiCalc architecture. SocialCalc performs all of its computations in the browser; it uses the server only for loading and saving spreadsheets.

For the Socialtext team, performance was the primary goal behind SocialCalc's design in 2006. The key observation was this: Client-side computation in JavaScript, while an order of magnitude slower than server-side computation in Perl, was still much faster than the network latency incurred during AJAX roundtrips:

...diagram on SocialCalc's scalability model... (Since that time, advances in JavaScript runtimes have mostly closed the gap; note that in the diagram.)

Toward the end of the AOSA chapter, we introduced simultaneous collaboration on spreadsheets, using a simple, chatroom-like architecture:

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8">
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
	<title>Paxton Fob converter</title>
	<style>
	table, th, td, div {
	border: 1px solid black;
	}