Book Image

Getting Started with WebRTC

By : Rob Manson
Book Image

Getting Started with WebRTC

By: Rob Manson

Overview of this book

WebRTC delivers web-based real-time communication and is set to revolutionize our view of what the Web really is. Streaming audio and video from browser to browser, as well as opening raw access to the camera and microphone, is already creating a whole new dynamic web. WebRTC also introduces real-time data channels that will allow interaction with dynamic data feeds from sensors and other devices. This really is a great time to be a web developer! Getting Started with WebRTC provides all of the practical information you need to quickly understand what WebRTC is, how it works, and how you can add it to your own web applications. It includes clear working examples designed to help you get started building your own WebRTC-enabled applications right away. Getting Started with WebRTC will guide you through the process of creating your own WebRTC application that can be applied in a number of different real-world situations, using well documented and clearly explained code examples. You will learn how to quickly and easily create a practical peer-to-peer video chat application, an audio only call option, and how a Web-Socket-based signaling server can also be used to enable real-time text-based chat. You will also be shown how this same server and application structure can easily be extended to include simple drag-and-drop file sharing with transfer updates and thumbnail previews.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with WebRTC
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up a simple WebRTC video call


The most common WebRTC example application involves setting up a video call between two separate users. Within a few seconds, you can easily see and talk to anyone, anywhere in the world who has one of the one billion or more WebRTC-enabled browsers. Let's take a detailed look at how this can be achieved and create the code we need as we go.

Throughout this book, some simple coding conventions will be used to aid communication and readability.

JavaScript APIs standardized by the W3C and other standards definition organizations will use the conventional camel case format (for example, standardFunctionCall()).

Functions and variables that have been defined for this book will use all lowercase strings and replace word breaks or white space with an underscore (for example, custom_function_call()).

The web and WebSocket server functionality in this example application will be implemented using JavaScript and Node.js. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide...