Dev Breakthroughs

With WebRTC, adding a peer-to-peer video chat to a site is as easy as child's play and the best part of it is that there is no need for your users to download plugins to use the service.

There are two pieces needed to set up peer-to-peer video chat using WebRTC: an HTML5 compliant browser, and the proper code on your server. This blog will walk you through the steps to get a simple service up and running.

Distributed Shared Memory enables a distributed in- memory database for JavaScript applications.

 

It lets web developers focus on developing highly interactive and responsive web-based collaboration software without having to deal with complicated issues such as networking protocols, database management, concurrency control.

 

This is good for implementing group-wares or collaborative web services supporting simultaneous real-time interactions.

Want to add voice calls and IM chat to iPhone, iPad or Android apps? In this quick video, Tim Panton shows how you can use the the brand new Phono Mobile toolkit and the PhoneGap mobile platform to create an iPhone app that connects users together in a conference call. Check it out… and then get started building your own iPhone and Android apps using Phono Mobile!

Check out the Phono Blog : http://bit.ly/qprmEA

These are the slides from Peter Lubbers's "HTML5 Real-Time and Connectivity" presentation at the 2012 San Francisco HTML5 User Group (http://sfhtml5.org).

Web pages and applications normally interact with web servers and other pages in a client-to-server relationship, in which the client addresses the server in one manner, paradigm and API, and the server addresses the client in a totally different one. In addition, methods for web applications to address and talk to other web applications are not even defined. The Web Connectivity API solves all of these issues.

 

Sending messages with Web Connectivity is almost instantaneous. Data is pushed out to the web applications, and immediately sent to the web servers. Web Connectivity also abstracts away the details of the transports used to establish the connection, allowing you to develop an application without having to contend with transport issues. In addition, it provides services to make life easier for both clients and servers.

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.