Is there a service or solution to integrate video/audio communications within your userbase on site or within application ?
Something like google hangouts, but users must have avatars and nicknames that is getting out of my database.
There are some frameworks that may give you what you want.
Twilio provides tools to allow you build combinations into your apps - they explain it pretty well on the site.
http://www.twilio.com
Ericsson has also just open sourced their Web RTC browser:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2691212/ericsson-releases-webrtc-browser-and-framework-as-open-source.html
Other examples include:
https://www.plivo.com/web-sdk/
http://www.webrtc.org/home
Essentially for the web application world, Web RTC is the technology you are most likely looking for and you will probably have to take a look at some of the more popular offering built around this to see which you like best and which best meets your needs.
If you want to build your own from the basic building blocks then Web RTC is a W3C standard based technology so you can find out about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC
http://w3c.github.io/webrtc-pc/
Related
These days I am finding myself in the position of having to implement for one of my college courses a system that should act as a giant wrapper over many communications apps like Gmail , Facebook Messenger maybe even WhatsApp .To put it simply you should have a giant web interface where you can authorize Gmail , Messenger and use them at once when required. I am thinking of going with an REST API to manage the user's services authorized by OAuth2.Also I am thinking of using Node.JS and Express.js in the backend and React.js in the frontend. I found some sweet libraries in npm that should take care of interacting with the involved APIs(https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-gmail-api this one for instance), but I am also doubtful about this approach , for example I have no idea how to keep the use notified about its incoming mails or messages for example . I am in dire need of some expertise since I forgot to mention but I am quite the newbie in this field. To sum it up for once my question is how would you implement such an infrastructure ? Is it my approach viable or I am bound to hit some really hard to overcome obstacles?
As a college exercise, it would be a really fun experiment, so it definitely worth the time you want to put into it. However, once you want to add more features, the complexity will go up pretty fast.
Here are a couple of ideas you can think of:
It's pretty clear that your system can't do more things than the capabilities exposed by the APIs of communication apps (e.g. you can't have notifications in gmail if the API doesn't have this capability).
For that reason, you should carefully study the APIs and what functionalities they expose. They have public docs that you can check out: (Gmail API, Facebook Messanger API)
Some of the apps you want to communicate with may not have an official API (e.g. WhatsApp) - those kinds of details you definitely want to know from the start.
Based on the analysis of those APIs, you should lay out a list of requirements for your system, which can be extracted from all the APIs, for example: message notifications, file transfers, user profiles, etc.
In this way, you know exactly what capabilities your system should have, and you don't end up implementing a feature that is available only in 1 API out of 4.
Also, it would be a bit challenging to design your system from a user perspective, because the apps have different usage patterns - chat apps, where messages are coming in real-time, vs email, which is not real-time communication. That's just a detail anyway, the gist of your project is to play with those APIs.
Also, it may worth checking out the Gateway Aggergation Pattern, which is related to this project - you may want the user to send a message to multiple apps, by using a single request to your service.
Just wondering what pro web developers use to publish their sites. Also I would like to know what big sites have used, such as Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Thank you for your time.
It's a difficult question to answer, I guess. The tools used by a developer depends on the customer requirements. It may be one of the following:
Static site with graphics and/or flash (simple business site)
Dynamic site with front-end html/CSS and database driven backend using php, perl, .net, Java, etc.
A large site that may use ecom along with content management system (CMS). There you may need CMS (such as Joomla) along with compatible plug-ins and customization.
For very popular sites such as Amazon, speed and bandwidth are very critical. Usually, though they start small (say, using PHP/MySQL, or ready-made CMS), they change according to their own requirements sooner or later using custom coding (Java is very popular). This is only my guess!
For co-ordination and publishing, GIT is very popular.
hope this helps.
I have a very general question on how to implement VoIP for our current mobile & Web App. (we have an Android+iOS App and a Web Application based on AngularJS/NodeJS).
What we want to achieve
In the first step we want to achieve inter Application Voice and Video Calls. Later on we might expand into outbound calls into the normal telephone network. But this post is mainly for getting info on how to implement only our first step.
general thoughts
We had some experiences with Asterisk before which turned out to be far from easy. So for this project we wanted to get some feedback before actually implementing anything.
thoughts on technology
At first I thought it might be a good idea to use WebRTC, but since it's only supported on Chrome, FF and Opera for the moment and pretty much is unsupported for native mobile Apps we think that WebRTC is probably out of the picture for now. (or do you think otherwise?)
After searching the web a bit more we found this: http://www.webrtc.org/native-code
Has anyone experience with this libs? It seems to us, that this could be the best solution for a modern voip solution (and also would allow us to skip the asterisk server)
The second idea would be to setup an Asterisk Server for ourselves. Every time a user logs into the App we would connect him as a SIP Client to the asterisk. If one user calls the other one we think we should be able to make the call for example with the node package Asterisk Manager API (https://github.com/pipobscure/NodeJS-AsteriskManager).
The third idea would be to use a SIP Provider, but at the moment I'm not sure if that's really the best idea.
Since we're no VoIP experts, are there any other possibilities for VoIP integration into our apps?
Any thoughts on that subject would be very appreciated! Thank you!
The main factor is the network configuration that you app will be working with. Given you're using mobile clients and web apps it's almost certain that you're using the internet and also likely that you'll have 3G and 4G mobile networks in the mix (3G/4G cause a lot more problems for VoIP than WiFi).
Given the above assumption holds the biggest challenge your app will have is establishing media (audio and/or video) connections between mobile clients which are behind different NATs and in a lot of cases multiple NATs. There is almost no chance you'd be able to get by without a server here. The server will be needed to act as a relay point for the media streams for the mobile clients. You will use the RTP protocol for the media and working out how to get it reliably from client A to client B is your biggest obstacle. The signalling side - whether it be SIP, web sockets or something else - will be secondary (note both SIP and WebRTC use RTP to carry the media).
If I were in your shoes the steps I'd take would be:
Install and try out some softphones (blink, bria, zoiper et al) on your own mobile devices, find a SIP provider that supports video calls and get some experience with calls. It may not be the experience you anticipated...
Once you are comfortable with the softphone experience you would then need to make two decisions:
Whether to deploy your own server or use an existing provider,
Whether to write your own client, find an existing one or something in between.
I can answer the deploy your own server question. You don't want to do that unless the VoIP part of your app is going to be something you charge for and make a good margin off. Running a VoIP server and all the security and network considerations that go along with it is a full time job. It may start out being easy but once a few customers start connecting and the fraudsters come along it will take on a life of its own. In the decade I've been messing around with SIP I'd estimate 75% of providers have gone out of business and it was their full time job.
Besides all that I'd be surprised if there wasn't a SIP provider that suited your needs. These days there are highly sophisticated services available that led you control every aspect of your call flow with your own code (anveo, tropo, twilio) right down to free services (sip2sip, sipbroker) that may be all you need to get started.
For the client software there are various SIP SDK's you'll be able to leverage (pjsip).
We have been using Worklight to develop hybrid apps to securely integrate with server generated pages. Our approach has been to use WebViews for Android and iOS platforms. Lately we have some folks who prefer using iFrame approach instead, primarily for ease-of-programming reason.
Are there security related concerns of using iFrame instead of WebView in hybrid mobile apps?
The security risks of using iFrames is well known, see for instance the discussions on this stackoverflow question.
Adding to that you have to trust that the iFrame support on each platform (iOS / Android) is properly implemented and consistent.
However, I would not recommend using iFrames on a hybrid app unless you really have to. My reasoning is that a hybrid app is already based on a WebView, so iFrames would be adding one extra layer to it, which adds unnecessary complexity (that also impacts performance and memory footprint)
Not only that, but the iFrame behavior and performance is not as polished as the WebView itself and the platform support is not as consistent, as described by this Phonegap article
Finally, this is a far less common use case and it might be harder to find support to resolve styling, performance and behavior issues with the JavaScript library communities like JQuery Mobile and Dojo Mobile.
Again, this is my personal opinion on the subject.
I'm doing a language web site for my university language center, where students login and see videos to learn English. i have to do it like this,
person is logging in to the system, search using a search area and find the details,lessons and videos relevant to that videos. this functionality exactly matches the youtube scenario.
for implementing twitter like functionality we can use status-net, is there a similer library, statusnet like famous implementation for youtube or a some kind of platform or a framework like codeigniter that we can use to implement youtube like site very easily??
please suggest some options?? a open source one or a commercial one ???
and what is the best video format to use in a such web site?? flv?? mp4?? or mov???
regards,
Rangana
Your best option is to use a 'cloud' based video processing service. Most have a sample project / library for many different languages and frameworks. Here is a list of a few I've tried and liked:
http://zencoder.com/
http://transloadit.com/
http://pandastream.com/
The typical steps involve uploading the video files to a large 'cloud' static asset host (such as S3) through the browser. If you are inexperienced it is best to select a processor that provides an uploader (it will handle putting the files in the right spot). Of the three, Transloadit and Panda both have custom unloaders.
Usually the service will allow you to either pass the encoding settings (what formats and qualities to) output to as parameters or configure them in your account. To support all current HTML5 browsers you just need H264 (.m4a) and OGG (.ogv). However, the new trend in the video world is for WEBM (.webm) so you might want to include it as well.
Next you will receive a unique code from the web service that you must store in persistent storage (database). The web service can be configured to 'callback' (perform an HTTP POST or GET request to your service) once the video is encoded.
Once your recieve a callback you can activate your video and start dislpaying it on your pages. For displaying, if you are inexperienced I'd highly recommend you use one of the following players:
http://sublimevideo.net/
http://longtailvideo.com/
http://videojs.com/
They all do similar things for different prices. My current personal favourite is Sublime Video (it offers cool light box effects and a gorgeous player).
Why do you have to re-implement Youtube when you can just use it for hosting your videos for free? Many online e-learning portals (e.g. Khan academy) do exactly that.
As far as the best video format to use -- go read about H.264/AVC. It's what Youtube currently uses.
I think you will not find already built solution ;)
But it's not really that hard. You can use existing frameworks that will make your life easier while you build account management system, the rest shouldn't be really that hard (assuming you don't really want to re-build the whole Youtube ;D ).
For playing videos, you can use JW Player. A great piece of software, you should check it out.