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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Someone should write a series of articles about this issue from the POV of Javascript/browser clients. There, UDP isn't available at all, and we also have to deal with quite a bit of pain in terms of differences between platform implementations.

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Well, you can use UDP in data channels:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/datachannels/

I am very enthusiastic about the future of WebRTC, but the last time I looked, it was a bit too new. I see now that it's supported in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stable. However, that only takes care of the browser side. I don't know of any Clojure library/server I can use with WebRTC.

Safari might support WebRTC in the coming months. Apple appointed 4 members to the WebRTC Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2000/09/dbwg/details?group=47318&public=1

Since the signaling is not part of the standard, on purpose, you can choose whatever you like (XMPP, SIP...) or create you own solution. On the server side, TURN is implemented to go through the NATs, the firewalls, that helps.

Web browsers were created to browse text files using hyperlinks. If you want to do advanced networking with a browser, use a plugin like Java.

Web browsers were created to browse text files using hyperlinks. If you want to do advanced networking with a browser, use a plugin like Java.

Yup, it's April Fools on the Internet, and everyone's a comic genius!

How is that a joke? It's unpopular, but entirely factual.

It works technically, but the main reason for using Javascript is that distribution and discovery is fantastic and requires no install. Java plugins have a bad reputation in terms of security and require an additional install. Using a Java plugin would take away any distribution and discovery advantage of the browser platform.

Yeah, I completely agree, but it's the only option for UDP. :-)

I wouldn't say the fact is unpopular. What's unpopular -- or using two better words, wrong and stupid -- is the fallacy that because something was originally created for a certain purpose, it must be used for that purpose and only that purpose for the rest of eternity.

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