Good in-depth explanations of WebRTC are still few and far between. Fortunately, Anant Narayanan of Firebase (and previously the WebRTC team at Mozilla) made a big contribution to the presentation-pool last week with his talk A Practical Introduction to WebRTC at Fluent Conference.
Be sure to check out the slides for the most complete set of WebRTC signaling flowcharts on the web (use the down arrow on slide 7). Seriously. if you want to understand what’s going on under the hood when you click “Start Call” in a WebRTC app, you need to read the flowcharts. We’ll wait.
FUDdy-duddy
WebRTC was top of mind over at No Jitter last week, with no fewer than three posts on the topic. Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research led off with a positive piece titled WebRTC: Why Should Enterprises care?
Perhaps more exciting is the opportunity to give CRM or ERP applications their own voice/video applications directly embedded into their web interfaces […] Think about a team of people who live in a business process application all day who can chat, talk, or video chat with each other […] Again, here the opportunities are endless for application developers to extend rich communications and collaboration anywhere.
Then Laurent Philonenko, VP/GM of Cisco’s Clients and Mobility Business Unit rained on the WebRTC parade with The Reality of WebRTC…All Hype?
[…] WebRTC is not quite ready for prime time. Simply put, the standards are not done. Assume the WebRTC standards completion is still one year out, and that it takes six months for Chrome and Firefox to ship a browser with the final standards; plus add the time for people to upgrade their browsers. We’ll see early implementations before, but I’d say it’s two-plus years before this technology is widely deployed in the market.
Dave Michels closed out with WebRTC Hype Check, kindly explaining that there’s nothing to see here, and you folks should really just move along.
WebRTC is not disruptive. […] WebRTC does not offer new capabilities, nor significant cost savings over other peer-to-peer technologies. WebRTC could be more accurately described as an evolutionary technology–effectively bringing real-time capabilities to the browser instead of reliance on ad-hoc plugins and downloads.
We’re biting our tongues for now, but you can expect to hear more on this subject here on the vLine Blog. In the meantime, we’ll be polishing up the design on our new line of “WebRTC Is Ready” T-Shirts.
Seriously. Drop us a line if you’d like one.
