Stolley Karl. Programming WebRTC: Build Real-Time Streaming Applications for the Web

The Pragmatic Programmers, 2024. — 220 p. — ISBN-13: 978-1-68050-903-8.Build your video chat application - but that's just the beginning. With WebRTC, you'll create real-time applications to stream any kind of user media and data directly from one browser to another, all built on familiar HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Power real-time activities like text-based chats, secure peer-to-peer file transfers, collaborative brainstorming sessions - and even multiplayer gaming. And you're not limited to two connected users: an entire chapter of the book is devoted to engineering multiple WebRTC apps that let groups of people communicate in real-time. You'll create your video conferencing app. It's all here.WebRTC is an API exposed in all modern web browsers. After almost a decade of development, the WebRTC specification was finalized, and this book provides faithful coverage of that finalized specification. You'll start by building a basic but complete WebRTC application for video chatting. Chapter by chapter, you'll refine that app and its core logic to spin up new and exciting WebRTC-powered apps that will have your users sharing all manner of data, all in real-time. No third-party libraries or heavy downloads are required for you or your users: you'll be writing and strengthening your knowledge of vanilla JavaScript and native browser APIs.You'll learn how to directly connect multiple browsers over the open internet using a signaling channel. You will gain familiarity with a whole set of Web APIs whose features bring WebRTC to life: requesting access to users' cameras and microphones; accessing and manipulating arbitrary user files, right in the browser; and web storage for persisting shared data over the life of a WebRTC call. Like any Web API, WebRTC doesn't enjoy a perfect implementation in any browser. But this book will guide you in writing elegant code to the specification, with backward-compatible fallback code for use in almost all modern browsers.Use WebRTC to build the next generation of web applications that stream media and data in real-time, directly from one user to another - all by working in the browser.What You Need:Readers need a text editor, an up-to-date copy of Chrome or Firefox, and a POSIX-style command-line shell. They'll also need to install a little bit of open-source software, especially Node.js. All necessary setup is covered in full in the book's introductory chapter.