Just to provide some context for those who may have only recently been exposed to the realtime web. The realtime web is not new -- it has been in operation for more than a decade, as embodied in commercial services such as Adobe Connect, WebEx, Live Meeting, etc. which serve millions of users on a daily basis. The realtime web is supported on virtually every major browser and web server platform. Javascript libraries for signalling are not a "future development" -- they have been around for a while. All that is really new here is the ability to engineer these services without plugins. That's important because it will make realtime web services considerably easier to develop and maintain. However, the "major event" occurred during the early 2000s. _____ Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:02:59 -0800 From: erik@hookflash.com To: jdrosen@jdrosen.net CC: rtc-web@alvestrand.no; dispatch@ietf.org Subject: Re: [RTW] Does RTC-WEB need to pick a signaling protocol? I understand the argument and agree that pure http might be the right course at some point in the future but the fact remains, SIP rules in communications "today", it will do so for years to come. It might be wise for us to move forward on a standard that is understood and appreciated by not only the developer community but also the business community paying the bills. Yes, we can build anew atop http, all it takes is time and money. An http effort will take a while, I think we all know that. How long did it take for SIP to displace H.323? I think the unanimous answer is "too long". We have a standard that exists today, one that we are all very familiar with, one that works! It would seem a shame not to leverage all we (and our employers) have invested, which is considerable. This is a major event in communications, we need to consider this carefully but we also owe it to "standards" to do it quickly, which has not been the norm it seems. Erik Lagerway | hookflash | m. 604.562.8647 On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Jonathan Rosenberg <jdrosen@jdrosen.net> wrote: I'm starting a separate thread on this, since I don't want to confound it with the charter discussion. This is a topic that should be resolved within the group itself, and here are my thoughts on it. If one asks the question on whether it is actually NECESSARY to require that a browser implement something like SIP in order to enable voip natively, the answer is definitively NO. The browser already provides a tool for exchanging messaging of arbitrary content between the browser and a server - its called HTTP (and websockets). Through client-side Javascript that comes from the server, an application can craft arbitrary protocol messaging of its own design between the client and the server. As an obvious example, in order to read mail on Gmail, the browser doesn't need to have an implementation of IMAP or POP; Gmail's Javascript implements the client side of a protocol of Google's design, and it talks to a web server which implements the server side of that protocol. The protocol is then then carried over HTTP. As such, if we take our charter here to define only what is truly REQUIRED of a browser, in order to enable voip without a plugin, then we do NOT need to pick a signaling protocol. All we need are the things which are truly impossible or grossly unsuitable for HTTP, and that is the real-time media path only. There need only be APIs for pushing in, and extracting out, the data that must be exchanged through HTTP-based signaling - and those are things like IP addresses and codec selections. That said, even if one asks the question of whether it is a good idea for us to pick something, I think the answer is no. The enormous benefit of the web model is its ability for innovation and velocity. Standardization is not needed for communications within the domain of the provider; new features can be developed and deployed as quickly as they can be conceived. This is something which, despite our best efforts here at IETF over the years, we have failed to achieve. I think it is critical that we allow web-based voip to innovate with the same kind of pace we've seen in the web overall. One of the arguments made on the list about why we should pick something, is that building their own signaling protocols and messaging is "hard" for a tiny web developer that just wants to add a bit of voice to their app. In such a case, I fully expect that within weeks or months of specification and implementation of RTC-WEB stuff in browsers, smart people will develop Javascript libraries which do all of this "hard work", along with PHP and many other server-side libraries with sit on the other side. None of it requires standardization, and we can let the open source community and the marketplace innovate on whatever solutions are needed. Thanks, Jonathan R. -- Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D. SkypeID: jdrosen Chief Technology Strategist Mobile: +1 (732) 766-2496 Skype SkypeIn: +1 (408) 465-0361 jdrosen@skype.net http://www.skype.com jdrosen@jdrosen.net http://www.jdrosen.net _______________________________________________ RTC-Web mailing list RTC-Web@alvestrand.no http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/rtc-web _______________________________________________ RTC-Web mailing list RTC-Web@alvestrand.no http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/rtc-web