The web browsers which was once acting as a gateway for your PC to access the World Wide Web has been evolving over a period of time. Today with the evolution of cloud based solutions and real time communication, the browsers have become a powerful platform with tons of intelligence being built into it everyday.
WebRTC is an open source project incorporated to build standardized browser API’s for real time communication. The project is supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. The project is being standardized by the IETF and W3C. WebRTC is an extension of the HTML5 standard. Developers who are writing web application can use these API’s for quickly bringing in additional capabilities in their web applications. Since these API’s are standardized, I think it would help reduce cross-platform portability issues for the application.
How is this WebRTC platform going to help in achieving what I cannot do today?
WebRTC is a universal API platform where real time communication implementors can use them. Say for example, today if you want to use Google video chat from within GMail, you would need to first install the plug-in for the browser before starting to use the service. The installable plug-in implementation would be different for different browsers/OS. In simple terms, WebRTC is going to solve this as the browser API support would be inbuilt in the browser.
Does this mean that any browser that supports WebRTC can become a SIP endpoint?
Absolutely yes!
Google Chrome added WebRTC 1.0 support early January this year. In April, Mozilla firebox have also started providing the basic support to its browser. Microsoft has also started incorporated WebRTC components in Internet Explorer, although there were no official release of IE with inbuilt WebRTC yet.
Here is how the browser layers are being split up to differntiate browser specific implementation, WebRTC API layer(being used by the browser developers to develop API’s) and the Web layer (used by the Web developers developing app for the browser)
[Picture courtesy: WebRTC.org]
Communication app providers such as Vonage, Nimbus etc are already cheering up for the WebRTC support.
Care to look into the webRTC roadmap? Check out here !
Have more queries, checkout the WebRTC FAQ page
WebRTC 1.0 is now available in Chrome Canary. Hoping to get some hands-on over the weekend.
Questions / thoughts – Leave me a comment.
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