Programming Tutorials

Browser Based Communications - WebRTC

By: William Alexander in Trends Tutorials on 2013-02-11  

With the advent of Web technology in the 20th century, a whole new world of different form of communications emerged. For instance, the internet chat or the IM became so popular and to a certain extend it still is. From iRC to AOL to MSN to Yahoo and google talk, the IM world has evolved quite a bit. With IM clients becoming so pervasive, the IM clients become richer in features by adding features like File sharing, photo sharing, group chat etc.

Services like Skype took the IM world to a new height by adding Voice and video to the communications thereby enabling people to talk face to face and leave voice and video messages. There are so many similar clients like Skype. To name a few, Wechat, Line, Viber, Tango, Whatsapp and even Facebook. The problem with these communications platform is that they are all Client/Server based or even if they are available via web, the communication still depends on a server to process the communications at the backend.

The new 'Browser based communications' also termed as 'web-based communications' or 'web-enabled communications' is a new technology that enables communications using peer-to-peer APIs and therefore eliminating the need for a server. Now what this really means for developers such as you is that you can write a simple audio, video, IM applications purely using the browser by coding in JavaScript.

With google now embracing this technology with their Chrome browser already supporting Browser based communications by supporting WebRTC a set of APIs released and supported by Google. More and more browsers are supporting WebRTC including FireFox. And it is Open Source and available freely for any developer to start coding. It is based on peer-to-peer APIs with the HTML5 standard and the core programming language that the developers need to master is just JavaScript. With that you can start developing your next generation communications client in just a few lines of code. From here you can get more details about WebRTC.