Re: [rtcweb] RTCWeb default signaling protocol [was RE: About defining a signaling protocol for WebRTC (or not)]

[Saúl Ibarra Corretgé <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 20, 2011, at 12:59 AM, Roman Shpount wrote:

> Randell,
> 
> What I fail to understand is in what way would adding signaling to the web browser would  make things easy to build? How is what you are proposing better then 2 or 3 well written samples?
> 
> On the other hand, if you decide to build such simple signaling interface, depending on what use case you are trying to address you will end up with very different libraries. You have to decide how complex you want to make this library on the server vs the client side. You will need to decide if the purpose of this library is to simplify browser-to-browser or browser-to-PSTN calls. There is going to be a large number of very complex decisions none of which have obvious answers and will greatly affect the overall library design.
> 
> Most importantly, I think this is a misconception that you can build something that can be developed in 20 lines or less and be useful. Real-time communication is order of magnitude more complex then most of the web related applications. You need to deal with multiple event sources, deal with event collisions, negotiation failures, call state machines. And this is what required for the basic call setups. Once you start dealing with transfers, conferences, call status monitoring, things become even more complex. It is almost impossible to develop something that is simple to use that serves more then one or two specific use cases. If we try to invent something like this we might never finish.

+1.

If we add some signaling protocol to the browser to ease web developers then someone might say "why don't we also add X, Y and Z". The browser only needs the media plane, the signaling can be elsewhere, and it's far better to have it elsewhere.

As Roman pointed out, RTC applications are not something that can nor should be done in 20 lines of JS. It's just complex. If people want to make simple apps they can build a simple JS library using an invented simple protocol. But RTCWeb shouldn't encourage this IMHO.

--
Saúl Ibarra Corretgé
AG Projects