Web Real-Time Communications: Course Projects

Project Description

For this project, you and a small team will leverage some combination of ExpressJS, Web Sockets/socket.io, Web Workers, Service Workers, and the Notifications API to create a web-based system that monitors a source for changes in data.

For example, you might periodically scrape the contents of the daily Congressional Record at congress.gov and run a diff against your last retrieved copy. Your project would then perhaps provide notifications of changes, as well as a page highlighting the changes as they’ve occurred–and that would also update in real-time as changes come in.

You can do this with any source of data that updates multiple times over the course of a typical day. Just be sure you do not run afoul of the copyright laws surrounding the data you’re using. (US Government publications, for example, generally are not protected by copyright because they are in the public domain.)

Project Description

For this project, you and your chosen team will create a peer-to-peer (one single user to one other single user) chat-based application that enables realtime audio, video, and text/data communication over a WebRTC connection. The WebRTC portion will enable two users to connect, but your app should allow multiple separate pairs of users to join their own private “rooms.”

In addition to that (the plus part of Chat Plus), your app will allow your pairs of users to engage in some kind of shared realtime activity: playing a game, listening to music or watching videos, or collaborating on a document or some other kind of intellectual work.

The plus part of your app can either be a feature that your team builds itself, or it can leverage the open API of any service that makes itself available. For example, if you decide to create an app for listening to music in pairs, you might have a way to share mp3 files with users as streaming data, using the RTCDataChannel, from one user’s computer—or you might leverage something like the Spotify API. While there may be particular use cases for something like the HTML <iframe> element, the plus part of your app must be more technologically sophisticated than simply loading the same web resource in the browsers of both users.

Finally, while you will almost certainly have need of WebSockets/socket.io for certain signaling tasks, your app should leverage WebRTC peer connections to ensure that the bulk of peer-to-peer communication and data sharing takes place browser to browser, rather than through your app’s third-party server. For example, if you build a game that two users can play together, various moves and states of game play should be transferred from player to player over WebRTC. You may, however, opt to additionally store game-state information on a server for the purposes of game recover, score keeping, etc.

Note: the requirements for this project are subject to change. Monitor Basecamp for any changes, which will also be noted and discussed in class.

Project Description

This project will be a refinement of Project Two, making fuller use of STUN/TURN signaling for more robust network interoperability and obviating the need for monkeying with firewalls, etc. Your group will make some kind of non-trivial revision, refactoring, or other improvement to your Chat Plus Alpha Release (Project Two). Additionally, your group will write a ~500-word proposal outlining a significant future improvement to your project.