WebRTC in 60 Seconds

WebRTC? WTF?

Web RTC stands for Web Real Time Communication. This is a technology that is supported at a browser-level that enables a peer-to-peer connection of two users through the internet.

This Real Time Communication can support lots of amazing things. Screensharing, File transfer and most commonly: Video-chat.

Basics

• WebRTC is is an collection of JavaScript API standards.
• That means that it's as fundamental to a browser as an alert("I am an alert box!"); or a console.log("I show up in the console!").
• Two users in a modern web-browser can connect with just a few lines of JavaScript.
• The hard part is signaling. Finding the other person in that open webpage among the millions of webpages out there.
• This all means that you can build Skype style video chat or other peer connections with with no hosting fees or 3rd party API's. Just good ol' web standards.

More detail about WebRTC + Rails