Given the extensive capabilities we have access to through communications networks, anything less than real-time exchanges tend to fall short of expectations. This is the main reason why the buzz is growing around WebRTC, allowing for real-time communications regardless of software, hardware or plugins.
The open-source platform has already been developed in Chrome, Opera and Firefox, with others expected to follow soon. To help educate the public, partners and organizations on the advancments in this space, TMC hosts the WebRTC Conference & Expo, with the most recent taking place in Santa Clara.
Frozen Mountain was on hand to demonstrate its latest WebRTC innovation, Ice Link, a peer-to-peer SDK for WebRTC. This SDK is designed to enable developers to build peer-to-peer applications quickly and easily, regardless of the platform. This initiative was born out of the need to develop a solution that would enable video conferencing capabilities in peer-to-peer environments.
The main focus for Frozen Mountain has always been to provide software that developers can use to quickly build what they need to solve business problems. As such, the company already offers a signaling library, Web Sync, Ice, STUN and TURN. For those developers who don’t want to get that far down into the guts of a project, Ice Link allows for an easy application build. The result was a conference API.
For WebRTC, Frozen Mountain actually demonstrated the process of building an application using Ice Link. The first step requires setting up the STUN TURN server and starting a signaling server. Step two is to set up the user media with access to audio and video components of the current device. The API takes care of this step so it won’t matter what device or platform is in use.
The final step is actually building the conference itself. While the conference API removes all of the lower level concepts, the developer hooks in some events to know when people arrive and leave and when they want to create or destroy a peer-to-peer connection. This is completed by bridging the signaling and conference API’s together through a couple of simple events built into the system. Everything is exposed throughout the entire SDK so developers can add their own relays, hooks to relays and more.
Plus, this application is running on IE and peer-to-peer, opening up possibilities for users everywhere. As such, the demand for video conferencing will be met with a whole new level of capabilities, eliminating the need to take extra steps for simple collaboration. This is truly at the heart of why WebRTC exists and why it will continue to evolve.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
