Comment by pthatcherg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pthatcherg | Hacker News Reader

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Chrome WebRTC developer here. Two quick thoughts:

1. A better headline would be "Ericsson open-sources another WebRTC implementation". WebRTC is a set of standards, and they are implementing them, which is one of the purposes of having standards: to have multiple implementations.

2. One of the purposes listed by Ericsson for having another implementation is to "transcend the pure browser environment and that native apps ... would become an important part of the WebRTC ecosystem". What I would like to point out is that the implementation of WebRTC found at webrtc.org (ie Chrome's implementation) already supports mobile and native apps. In fact, the documentation is linked to right from the front page:

http://www.webrtc.org/reference/native-apis

And there are lots of native/mobile apps that already use it.

Our (Ericsson Research) view:

1. Agreed. That headline was not written by us. 2. The reason for having another impl. is not the lack of native app support in Google's implementation. Rather, you should read it as one of the motivations for developing OpenWebRTC in the first place.

A few months ago, I tried building the Google WebRTC implementation, but got an error about missing Java libraries. I'm not sure why Java is needed to build a C++ API, even then, requiring Oracle Java 6 and not working with OpenJDK.

Ericsson's implementation, on the other hand, has a much simpler build process. Just run the shell script and it works.

I am pretty sure Java is only needed to build the Java wrapper. There may be a build target or a flag you can use to avoid this.

I'll agree Ericsson's implementation is simpler, but maybe not as robust.

Oh, also... I forgot I created an ansible playbook on ansible-galaxy a couple weeks ago that builds Google's webrtc implementation:

https://github.com/jgrowl/ansible-galaxy-webrtc

It will build the JAR target but that will build the .so file as part of the process.

I am curious. How did you come to work on the WebRTC stack for Chrome?

I applied to Google. They hired me. I worked on Google Talk and Hangouts for many years. WebRTC was related and interesting, so I worked on various parts (such as the data channels) in my 20% time. After a while, I liked it so much I chose to make it my 100% time.

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