WebRTC DataChannels just hit Chrome stable | Hacker News Reader

WebRTC DataChannels just hit Chrome stable

cdn.peerjs.com

84 pointshazelcough24 comments

The docs say "Note that the server is only for brokering connections and does not proxy data between peers."

So what browser API does the PeerJS use to exchange data with something other than a server, particularly another browser?

Is this it? https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol...

Yep, that's it.

          8.  Security Considerations

             To be done.

:-(

One nice thing is that all data channels are encrypted DTLS by default

How do the endpoints authenticate each other?

I tried disconnecting the wifi after couple of messages. It is not working. It needs server always it seems. senthil, http://mocdoc.in

Just to clear up any misunderstanding, are you trying this on two laptops on your home network?

If so, you still need wifi for the connection between them, The cool thing about PeerJS is that the data goes directly between the computers (A <--> B) without a server in between (A <--> S <--> B).

No, in a single laptop with two different tabs of chrome browser.

Must stay up all night and develop first DataChannel based P2P BitTorrent style file sharing implementation tonight..

Make haste! People on Canary had a head start :P.

Also note that currently DataChannels do not support reliable transfer and have a small MTU, so sending enormous files does not yet work. With PeerJS you can send smaller files, but larger ones will take an unreasonable amount of time.

And it's been in Firefox for a while too. (Nightly only, maybe?)

It is currently enabled in nightly (Fx22) and Aurora (fx21). No promises it won't get turned off in Fx21 before ship but that appears to be the current target release.

I always thought it would be cool to do distributed cache in browsers with this technology. It would be like an organic CDN, automatically making the internet faster.

That's precisely what I'm building https://github.com/DanielRapp/peerbalanced ;)

Cache poisoning with spam in 3, 2, 1...

Might want to check this out: https://github.com/PeerKit/peercdn

It's written with PeerJS, by one of the other creators of PeerJS, same as OP.

Looks neat, do you know if they're planning on open sourcing the server implementation as well?

There is a hack to get around this (in Chrome) by increasing the SDP channels transfer rate (I think), still doesn't solve the MTU/reliable issue though. I originally found it via ShareFest - https://github.com/Peer5/ShareFest/issues/10 & have it integrated (in library form) here - https://github.com/erbbysam/webRTC-data.io I haven't tested this yet on Chrome Stable though.

I was surprised Bittorent was working on a plugin for the browsers, instead of using this. Same for their live streaming tech. It would be much better if you didn't need extra software/plugins to install to use it.

While it's not BitTorrent, I have a simple file sharing implementation and slides about data channels here: http://rohanradio.com/rtc-p2p

Feel free to fork mine: https://github.com/hcliff/ampere

It's the only one I've seen that abides to the bittorrent spec (where possible). BEP 9 and 10 support incoming.

(Demo's broken, need to push a fix :()

check out http://peercdn.com

Someone should build a meshnet!

I get no text in the blue box, but my Chrome is past the required version...

Your browser version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.43 Safari/537.31

Currently Google Chrome 26.0.1403.0 or above is required.

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