WebRTC has proven itself so much that there might be no more need to get excited about it., at least according to blogger Chris Koehcne, blogging at Chris Kranky.
After seeing a tweet by his colleague Dave Michels saying that the hype around WebRTC was dying down.
“Think back. Years ago, when Jeff Pulver capitalized on VoIP with his infamous VON show, there was no way you could build even a simple voice app by yourself,” he wrote. “You needed to buy stuff. Stuff from pesky vendors. You couldn’t build a softphone by yourself, that was nearly impossible involving black magic and uninvented science. You needed some type of softswitch to ‘switch’ things and numerous vendors leapt in your face if you had $5 in your pocket. Of course you needed a security SBC box as well, least the evil empire discover an open door. Finally, you’d better have been compliant with a long list of numb titled RFC-xxxx least none of the items in your shopping cart would work at all.”
Unlike proprietary solutions like Skype, WebRTC is an open standard that works within a Web browser developed by Google. Naturally, the latest version of Chrome supports WebRTC, as well as Firefox.
The WebRTC API makes writing new telecommunications apps easily.
“You have a browser, you have a Notepad application. You’re ready to write your first WebRTC application,” Koehcne wrote.
With the basic technical challenges out of the way, developers can focus on adding features to their WebRTC applications.
For Koehcne, the initial WebRTC applications have formed a “base camp” showing that vendors like Siemens and Citrix will have to take the technology to higher levels, replacing inefficient tools that have been around for a decade or more
“It’s time to pack up and indeed move to the next higher camp, it will be tough going, some of of us won’t make it, some new strange types will join the trek,” he wrote.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
