[whatwg] ConnectionPeer experiences

[Harald Alvestrand]

Thank you Patrik, I enjoyed reading that!

Questions:
- In your experimentation, did you find any reasonable underlying 
protocol to map sendFile, sendBitmap and their corresponding callbacks 
to, or did you just ignore them for now?
- In connecting, did you operate with connections going via a server, or 
did you go between browsers? If so, how did you identify the server vs 
identifying the remote participant? Was the "remoteConfiguration" method 
flexible enough?

I'm currently staring at the problem of defining a set of semantics for 
mapping this to RTC-Web protocols, and am having some problems 
interpreting what's currently in the spec, so would like your 
interpretation.

                     Harald

On 01/26/11 01:04, Patrik Persson J wrote:
> We have done some experimentation with the ConnectionPeer API. We have
> an initial implementation of a subset of the API, using ICE (RFC 5245)
> for the peer-to-peer handshaking.  Our implementation is
> WebKit/GTK+/gstreamer-based, and we of course intend to submit it to
> WebKit, but the implementation is not quite ready for that yet.
>
> More information about our work so far can be found here:
> https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-html5-peer-peer-conversational-video
>
> However, we have bumped into some details that we'd like to discuss
> here right away.  The following is our mix of proposals and questions.
>
> 1. We propose adding a readyState attribute, to decouple the
>     onconnect() callback from any observers (such as the UI).
>
>        const unsigned short CONNECTING = 0;
>        const unsigned short CONNECTED = 1;
>        const unsigned short CLOSED = 2;
>        readonly attribute unsigned short readyState;
>
> 2. We propose replacing the onstream event with custom events of type
>     RemoteStreamEvent, to distinguish between adding and removing
>     streams.
>
>        attribute Function onstreamadded;   // RemoteStreamEvent
>        attribute Function onstreamremoved; // RemoteStreamEvent
>        ...
>        interface RemoteStreamEvent : Event {
>           readonly attribute Stream stream;
>        };
>
>     The 'stream' attribute indicates which stream was added/removed.
>
> 3. We propose renaming addRemoteConfiguration to
>     setRemoteConfiguration.  Our understanding of the ConnectionPeer is
>     that it provides a single-point-to-single-point connection; hence,
>     only one remote peer configuration is to be set, rather than many
>     to be added.
>
>        void setRemoteConfiguration(in DOMString configuration, in optional DOMString remoteOrigin);
>
> 4. We propose swapping the ConnectionPeerConfigurationCallback
>     callback parameters. The current example seems to use only one (the
>     second one).  Swapping them allows clients that care about 'server'
>     to do so, and clients that ignore it (such as the current example)
>     to do so too.
>
>        [Callback=FunctionOnly, NoInterfaceObject]
>        interface ConnectionPeerConfigurationCallback {
>           void handleEvent(in DOMString configuration, in ConnectionPeer server);
>        };
>
> 5. Should a size limit to text messages be specified? Text messages
>     with UDP-like behavior (unimportant=true) can't really be reliably
>     split into several UDP packets.  For such long chunks of data, file
>     transfer seems like a better option anyway.
>
> In summary, then, our proposal for a revised ConnectionPeer looks as follows:
>
>     [Constructor(in DOMString serverConfiguration)]
>     interface ConnectionPeer {
>        void sendText(in DOMString text, in optional boolean unimportant); // if second arg is true, then use unreliable low-latency transport (UDP-like), otherwise guarantee delivery (TCP-like)
>        attribute Function ontext; // receiving
>
>        void sendBitmap(in HTMLImageElement image);
>        attribute Function onbitmap; // receiving
>
>        void sendFile(in File file);
>        attribute Function onfile; // receiving
>
>        void addStream(in Stream stream, in optional DOMString metadata, in optional String mediaFormat);
>                                 //Start stream, add meta data and encoding parameters
>        void removeStream(in Stream stream);
>        readonly attribute Stream[] localStreams;
>        readonly attribute Stream[] remoteStreams;
>
>        attribute Function onstreamadded; // receiving new stream
>        attribute Function onstreamremoved; // stream not received any more
>
>        void getLocalConfiguration(in ConnectionPeerConfigurationCallback callback); // maybe this should be in the constructor, or be an event
>        void setRemoteConfiguration(in DOMString configuration, in optional DOMString remoteOrigin); // remote origin is assumed to be same-origin if not specified. If specified, has to match remote origin (checked in handshake). Should support leading "*." to mean "any subdomain of".
>        void close(); // disconnects and stops listening
>
>        attribute Function onconnect;
>        attribute Function onerror;
>        attribute Function ondisconnect;
>
>        const unsigned short CONNECTING = 0;
>        const unsigned short CONNECTED = 1;
>        const unsigned short CLOSED = 2;
>        readonly attribute unsigned short readyState;
>     };
>
>     interface RemoteStreamEvent : Event {
>        readonly attribute Stream stream;
>     };
>
>     [Callback=FunctionOnly, NoInterfaceObject]
>     interface ConnectionPeerConfigurationCallback {
>        void handleEvent(in DOMString configuration, in ConnectionPeer server);
>     };
>
> What do you think?
>
> In addition to the above there is a need to add support for
> identifying streams (so that the receiving end can use the right
> element for rendering) and for influencing the media format.  Those
> parts we're still working on.
>
> --
>     Patrik Persson, Ericsson Research
>     mailto:patrik.j.persson at ericsson.com
>