A microservices architecture for collaborative document editing enhanced with face recognition

摘要

Modern web applications can now provide rich and dynamic user experiences, such as allowing multiple users to collaboratively edit rich-text documents in real-time from multiple devices. Application architectures are evolving to support the development and deployment of such interactive functionality by decoupling software components into microservices. This paper introduces the architecture and the implementation of a collaborative rich-text editor that makes use of microservices to enable and enhance its scalable co-editing functionality. This includes microservices for synchronizing unstructured text using operational transformations, for chat functionality, and for detecting and recognizing faces in images added to the editor. The architecture makes use of Docker to allow for the development and testing of individual services as separate containers enabling seamless deployment across the available network of computers and other computing devices. The system will be demonstrated by showing how microservices make it possible for multiple users to co-edit a document where images containing faces are added and recognized as part of the document content, thereby supporting the document creation process.