Programming WebRTC: Build Real-Time Streaming Applications for the Web

Build your own video chat application—but that’s just the beginning. With WebRTC, you’ll create real-time applications to stream any kind of user media and data directly from one browser to another, all built on familiar HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Power real-time activities like text-based chats, secure peer-to-peer file transfers, collaborative brainstorming sessions—even multiplayer gaming. And you’re not limited to two connected users: an entire chapter of the book is devoted to engineering multipeer WebRTC apps that let groups of people communicate in real time. You’ll create your own video conferencing app. It’s all here.

WebRTC is an API exposed in all modern web browsers. After almost a decade of development, the WebRTC specification was finalized, and this book provides faithful coverage of that finalized specification. You’ll start by building a basic but complete WebRTC application for video chatting. Chapter by chapter, you’ll refine that app and its core logic to spin up new and exciting WebRTC-powered apps that will have your users sharing all manner of data with one another, all in real time. No third-party libraries or heavy downloads are required for you or your users: you’ll be writing and strengthening your knowledge of vanilla JavaScript and native browser APIs.