Nowadays integrated video and audio communication clients are highly demanded as integral part of web interfaces of a wide range of internet services. However, in a variety of aspects, creating browser VoIP clients causes significant technical difficulties. The report discusses the reasons for the current state of affairs in the area of VoIP, considers its future prospects, and offers a number of practical solutions implemented by the report’s authors aimed at creating SIP appletphones and web clients within video conferencing systems.
Web interfaces have always been an integrated part of internet services. Now, when the number of software and hardare platforms keeps growing continuously, the advantages and prospects of web applications and thin clients are out of question. A web interface is definitely a huge competitive advantage if not a necessity for numerous modern software systems. Banking clients, mail services, and even full-featured office tool packages are being created based on HTML, Javascript and AJAX, thus providing their compatibility with the most of widely distributed user platforms. However, telephony, including video telephony and video conferencing, has become a clearly proplematic area in the field of browser application development.
Nowadays user-friendly video and audio communication clients are highly demanded as integral part of web interfaces of a wide range of internet services. Click-for-сall services are appreciated by online stores since it looks pretty attactive to place a voice order by simply clicking a button on a web page. Mobile operators would like to implement full-featured softphones on their websites thus presenting themselves on the VoIP market. Video conferencing providers are also reluctant to force all the video conference participants (often one-time users) to install native video conferencing applications on their computers.
However, in spite of being highly popular, in a variety of aspects creating browser VoIP clients cause significant technical difficulties. The developer always has to select a web development platform from a limited set of available ones, or create a hybrid solution. Also, an additional server infrastructure has to be created as a rule. Lack of full support for HTML5 and WebRTC in widely distributed modern browsers and vague perspectives of the Flash technology make the issue even more acute.
The report discusses the reasons for the current state of affairs in the area of VoIP, considers its perspectives for the future, and offers a number of practical solutions implemented by the report’s authors aimed at creating SIP appletphones and web clients within video conferencing systems. We center around the possibilities and practical experience in using such technologies as WebRTC, HLS, Adobe Flash, Java Web Start, Silverlight. We also consider the development issues and architecture of SIP/WebRTC/RTMP gateways.
Alexander Ivanenko
Senior Software Engineer, Auriga
Graduated from Moscow State Industrial University in 2005 with a major in computer science. For over 10 years Alexander has been engaged in the development of large client-server systems. Since 2008 specializes in VoIP and media data processing technologies. Participated as an architect and senior developer in the development of large-scale media transcoding systems, media gateways, SIP softphones.
Alexey Protsenko
Senior Software Engineer, Auriga
PhD in technical scienses, software engineer at Auriga. Has 9 years of experience in commercial software development, mainly in the area of ERP systems. Since 2011 participated in the development of a video content cloud storage system capable to deliver video content to a wide range of user devices.
2004 to 2012 – a lecturer at Southwest State University, where he delivered courses on Computer Networks and Programming Technologies
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