WebChat via WebRTC

Question

We are currently in the middle of a large infrastructure rebuild. We are replacing everything from the CRM to the ERP to the CTI.

We have decided to use WebRTC for the CTI. After working with WebRTC for a bit I really see the promise in this technology and started to think that maybe this is the way we want to go for our Webchat as well.

The premise behind this is to be able to add Voice / Video and Screensharing to our chat feature at some point in time.

Since WebRTC is not supported in Safari IE Edge Etc. I am thinking we may be just slightly ahead of ourselves in using WebRTC for text chat.

One thought would be to build it all out as WebRTC determine if the browser allows as default back to XMPP etc.

I have been researching this on my own and have found some options out there like talky.io but in this rebuild we are focusing on not having any third parties involved in our applications (We have had a couple go bye bye with no warning).

Is there a framework / library / open source project out there that tackles part or all of this task?

Is this task as daunting as I think it is going to be or am I overreacting?

Am I crazy, should be locked in a padded room and use an existing chat service?

Toshikotoss

Answer 1

talky is built ontop of https://github.com/legastero/stanza.io which includes a jingle/webrtc module

Ferino

I saw stanza when researching. Thanks for the input. I will wait for some additional input before I close this as answered – Toshikotoss

The stanza library is very big (some 31,000 lines of code) which has to be loaded into the browser. The XMPP protocol is quite heavyweight too just for chat. There is work happening on a Cordova plugin for webrtc github.com/eface2face/cordova-plugin-iosrtc, and there is adapterjs for Safari support – Gravitt

Answer 2

Take a look at the Jitsi project (specifically Jitsi Meet). A public version is running at meet.jit.si that you can try out; it uses webrtc for the voice / video, and Jingle / XMPP for the signaling. It is all open source, so you can be sure you won't lose access if the company goes under or something else bad were to happen. The Jitsi team runs it using the Prosody XMPP server; they make a good combination.

Booby