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Comment by shams93 | Hacker News Reader

I looked at this for my project but we need to be able to do server side recording so we went with Janus gateway instead. It's a lean and mean c program that now supports plugins in rust. The one downside of jitsi is that it's a large java application. I can run Janus on a raspberry pi.

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Jitsi Meet can record server-side with Jibri <https://github.com/jitsi/jibri>, although that is still experimental.

Yeah we tried jibri but the problem we had is it just doesn't scale compared to the Janus archive plugin. What jitsi needs is a server side peer that can connect to gstreamer to record and broadcast sessions

I think it is an important point that it is still using java. Java once the hero of portability is in my opionion just the hero of zero days and slow programs.

It also would not be the software to install on my grandmas pc because of the many important java updates which are needed. The automatic installation of a browser plugin i don't need and which makes it even more vulnerable.

I think if Android would not be using Java it would have died years ago.

On the other hand. Jitsi still great software. Open source and all.

> I think if Android would not be using Java it would have died years ago.

I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of enterprise software running on Java for decades now. Not only it's not going away, but the language itself and its ecosystem are evolving. Slowly, but in the domain of programming languages that are actually being widely used slow progress is a good thing.

Anecdotally, I remember similar comments to this when the tide was shifting away from PHP.

I'm no defensor of Java but PHP was never entrenched in Enterprise the way Java is. It's "good enough" for most business uses who treat software as a comodity and outsource to multiple vendors.

Gonna second this - as much as I dislike Java there are a enormous number of very stable and mature projects in both the opensource and commercial/enterprise world. Many times there isn't even a alternative.

On macOS java is packaged with the bundle. No need to install a JRE separately. Not sure how it is on windows.

For Jitsi Meet, you don't have to install anything on a PC but a WebRTC capable browser. On iOS, you (still) need an app, although Safari is starting to support WebRTC natively.

Java on the server is a safe language. I agree that any browser plugin affects security and usability negatively, and the Java browser plugin was a nightmare.

I think you have not understood "C is the desert island language". Java is very much used for application because C++ is a nightmare, C is prehistoric, ...

Recently I have migrated a large application from RedHat 6 to RedHat 7. A lot of code in Ada, C++, Java (all using corba), many scripts in shell, Perl, Awk, make. Most of the code changes needed were in C++.

Most of the new applications here are developed in java or C#.

Modern C++ is a pleasure to work with, despite lacking a packaging ecosystem like Maven's. Though I agree it's way too easy to shoot oneself in the foot. Specially when dealing with large teams of not-so-great corporate developers.

So, translated to most real life terms, C++ is a nightmare :)

We are a Java shop so jitsi was initially our first choice. However we also need to record and broadcast sessions and jibri was not robust enough. Setting up Janus was painful because we don't usually support non Java applications but Janus fit our needs more tightly because we are not a standard video conference app.

I'm not saying Java is bad we are a Java shop but if you look at resource usage Janus is incredibly tight and small. W do live broadcast with webrtc so jitsi wasn't really matched to our use case. Jitsi is a fantastic project but it's meant for group chat rather than media broadcast. Red5 was another thing we looked at but the open source plugin for webrtc was too unstable for us.

What plugins do you use with the Janus gateway?

I'm using the archive video room and broadcast plugins, if not for the need for archives and broadcast we would have gone with jitsi because we are a Java house normally but because we need to have scalable archive recording Janus was the only fit besides rolling our own. It's been very light and stable. We also had good results with jitsi and would have u it but janus fit our requirements with broadcast and server side recording.

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