Real-time collaboration for Shambles

We recently had a request to supply Shambles with an Etherpad solution. He is a frequent user of Etherpad for seminars and conferences and wanted to host his own server.

Etherpad allows for a large number of users to collaborate on the same document in real-time through a web browser. The company behind Etherpad was launched in November 2008 and later acquired by Google in December 2009 for implementation within Google Wave. This never happened and as many may know Google Wave was terminated by Google, which released Etherpad as open source. The future development of Etherpad is now being managed by the Etherpad Foundation.

This interesting project was taken by one of our technicians with help from the Etherpad Foundation community. In this post we will not get into the installation and configuration details, but briefly cover some of the challenges faced with building a professional Etherpad instance.

It was soon apparent that the installation of Etherpad, would be far from smooth. Often many hours on search engines or in IRC was required to get answers to even small changes.

We chose to build on Debian, since it is well recognized within the community and several packages have already been built. Furthermore we wanted to strengthen and tidy the installation by placing Etherpad behind a Nginx reverse proxy. Besides adding a layer of security to the installation it also allows for removal of port numbers in the URL.
Finally we wanted to connect it to our MySQL cluster for added performance and uninterrupted backup capabilities.

The end result of the Etherpad build can be seen here on the open sourced version of Shamblespad: http://shamblespad.com

For more information about getting your own Etherpad instance, please check this link: http://www.nixtech.net/appliance/etherpad