Using CRDTs to build collaborative Rust web applications

Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) are essential for maintaining data consistency across networks where multiple users can read and write data simultaneously. This tutorial explores building a last write wins (LWW) CRDT to manage communication among network clients without conflicts, ensuring all peers remain in a consistent state. A simple web application is developed using Rust, featuring a front-end for client connectivity and data input into a 3x3 grid via a WebSocket server. The LWW CRDT ensures that the most recent data write is preserved across all clients, using timestamps and a randomization mechanism to resolve simultaneous writes. The project involves setting up three Rust projects for the server, client, and shared data types, leveraging frameworks like Leptos for the front end and utilities such as serde for data serialization. While the tutorial uses a centralized server for simplicity, fully distributed, local-first apps can be developed using CRDTs. The approach demonstrates the potential of Rust in building full-stack applications and emphasizes the benefits of CRDTs in achieving data consistency, suggesting Automerge for production-grade CRDT-based applications.