SyncDesk : A Real-Time Multi-User Collaboration Platform Using WebSockets

SyncDesk is a multi-modal real-time collaboration platform integrating code editing, rich-text documents, interactive whiteboarding, and chat in a single web environment. It allows multiple authenticated users (e.g. students or teams) to co-edit content within a private "room." Built with a React frontend and Node.js/Express + Socket.IO backend (MongoDB for persistence), SyncDesk propagates edits (characters or drawing strokes) word-by-word to all participants. It exploits Engine.IO transport (upgrading from HTTP polling to WebSocket) to achieve near real-time updates (observed <100 ms round-trip in local tests)[1]. The contributions of this work are (1) a unified multi-tool architecture for collaborative editing, (2) fine-grained synchronization using Socket.IO events, and (3) role-based access control with persistent versioning. These address the gap noted by Wang et al. that no existing system integrates these varied collaboration modes[2][3].