Re: higher level APIs (was:

> On Dec 4, 2018, at 1:46 AM, Lennart Grahl <lennart.grahl@gmail.com> wrote:
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> 
> 
> On 04.12.18 03:30, Bernard Aboba wrote:
>> Justin said:
>> 
>> 
>> "However, if we want to reframe the effort similar to what Youenn proposes, namely defining a protocol-agnostic NG API, and then considering QUIC as one substrate on which this API can be implemented (perhaps amongst others), that might facilitate reaching a consensus here."
>> 
>> 
>> [BA] Two protocol agnostic APIs have previously been discussed in the WEBRTC WG:
>> 
>> 
>> a. WHATWG Streams.  At the F2F meeting in Stockholm there was some enthusiasm for use of WHAT WG streams for multiple transports (e.g. SCTP data channel as well as QUIC).  At TPAC Lyon, Peter made a concrete proposal for QUIC, and Jan-Ivar discussed steps toward streams support for the SCTP data channel.  So there is a concrete proposal for a protocol-agnostic NG API on the table.  However, it's not yet clear whether WHATWG streams is the best way to address critical issues such as multi-threading or whether other approaches might offer similar benefits in a wider set of circumstances.  So one way forward is to continue to investigate approaches to multi-threading, including data transfer in workers and WHATWG streams.

Agreed that this is the first thing to investigate in terms of API design.

>> 
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>> b. RTCDataChannel.  As Peter noted in his presentation at TPAC Lyon, the original goal was to enable QUIC as a transport for the existing RTCDataChannel API.  The current draft of WebRTC-QUIC allows RTCDataChannel (or at least the reliable portion of it) to be built on top of it, assuming that the data channel protocol for QUIC were to be defined.  However, it's not clear how much developer enthusiasm there is for exposing QUIC via a WebSockets/RTCDatachannel API.

If it is important to quickly ship support for QUIC in the context of WebRTC, a RTCDataChannel API on top of QUIC makes some sense to me.
To be attractive, that would require other things we discussed in the past, like a RTCDataChannel constructor, webrtc-ice...

>> 
> 
> If the proposed QUIC API migrates to WHATWG streams and the existing
> RTCDataChannel API does too (which is what Jan-Ivar and I have started
> working on), then I don't see a real need for a unified API. The
> transports will always have different functionality. As a developer, one
> would only have to swap out the part of the code that constructs the
> transport but sending and receiving a stream would be virtually identical.

Agreed on the developer side of thing, this is the main goal of why a unified API makes sense to me.
If it is more efficient and easy to fulfill this requirement without a separate spec/clear abstraction, that is fine by me.
When I look at webrtc-pc RTCDataChannel section, the text is pretty agnostic to SCTP so the cost of such abstraction might not be very high.

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2018 17:26:11 UTC