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Flip is a framework that handles your application model, in a MV* pattern. Each time you’ll edit or visit your model, you’ll use Flip objects and containers. Modifications upon your model will go through transactions and Flip will handle the distribution of these transactions automatically. As Flip is able to play transactions forward and backward, it may rollback a transaction if a conflict happened. The great thing here is that it will also handle undo/redo for free, as you’ll be able to ask Flip for a transaction rollback anytime.

Flip is easily portable. It currently works for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Web (JS) but any platform can be reached quickly.

Instead of projections we'll take real life customer story as reference:

1. New project. This is the ideal scenario as there won’t be any integration cost, only setup. Flip is young developer friendly, as there are not a lot of new principles to understand. BTW we generally prefer to advice at the very early stage in order to push some best practices and be sure that the whole concept is understood. A single consulting week should be enough to ensure optimal conditions.
2. Young project. For a team of 4 developers and a 2 years old product, the integration happened in a milestone that also included moving from one platform to two, simplifying tremendously the undo/redo feature and improving significantly the architecture. It took roughly 4 months.
3. Big legacy code, market leader. 50 developers, decades of legacy code. We developed a quick proof of concept within two weeks. The first 6 months were then spent in evaluation for the team to be sure that the technology was rock solid. During that time we also adapted some options in order to fit their needs and best practices. The integration phase was quite smooth and fast, around 3-6 months.

Today, real time collaboration is more a marketing term than a technical one so we felt the need for a more accurate definition. The following is based on our experience and Google Doc's precedent as a real time collaborative application able to get user's adoption :

1. users can access the same document at the same time.
2. each user has a private undo/redo stack.
3. synchronous editing time should be below 1 second. Synchronization time is the time between when a user makes a change and when it is effective for others.

The reason was: the value is high but the cost is even higher, the time to market very long and more importantly, there is the risk of failure.
How many developers worked on Operational Transform or a Diff/patch (merge) approach before discovering it’s a dead-end? A lot, and we won’t put names here, but we have many.

Last year, we integrated Flip with a complex application: decades of legacy code, millions of lines of code,  a team of fifty developers working on it continuously... And the integration went very smoothly. We found only 2 bugs and fixed them on the same day. That’s a strong indication of how little the risk has become.

That’s why we think something has changed.This will be the first time that a market leader will be turned into a multi-user application by a generic technology and with a short time to market.

Irisate was founded by Ohm Studio creators, which is the most advanced real-time collaborative (RTC) pro Digital Audio Workstation and probably the most complex RTC application ever made. We’ve worked 10 years on this project and tested it in production with 160+K users.

Irisate is about sharing our knowledge and distributing Flip, the technology that handles the technical part of RTC.

Sad thing here is that we can’t name them yet as they want to control their communication. That’s a significant loss for us as we can’t get any word of mouth but be sure you’ll be informed as soon as their product is released.

The only project we can freely talk about is a french laboratory who get a grant in order to create a visual programming language for music, like Max, but real time collaborative, and with brand new features. Here is the Git repository if you want to know more.