Re: What would you like to see in WebRTC next? A low-level API?

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:03 AM Philipp Hancke <fippo@goodadvice.pages.de>
wrote:

> Am 24.01.2018 um 00:37 schrieb Bernard Aboba:
> > I'll provide some more detailed comments later, but would like to
> provide a few high-level thoughts (with my Chair hat off).
> >
> > Overall, my experience with developers is that they care most about
> stability and functionality.
> >
> > If there is a way to make something work, and if it is stable enough to
> deploy in production, they will incorporate it into their applications,
> even if many of would consider it a "hideous hack".
> >
> > So enabling something new, useful and solid is a good way to gain
> developer mindset.
> >
> > Doing the same thing in a more elegant way can be intellectually
> satisfying, but can be hard to convince developers to utilize if their
> existing code can do the same thing, albeit somewhat more clumsily.
> >
> > All this to say that if the goal is to create things that developers
> will use, it is often best to start from problems:  things developers want
> to do, but have not been able to do so far.
>
> Having ported a rather complex app to use addTrack&friends instead of
> the "legacy" addStream one I can say that:
> 1) I haven't found much that I could not do with addStream
> 2) it takes a lot of time and has close to zero business value
> 3) you pay an extra price for using the latest and greatest. When your
> CI dashboard goes red because you happen to be using Chrome's native
> addTrack because its available and not quite ready yet...
> 4) I mainly did this to ensure the WG doesn't specify things that will
> make my life harder in the distant future
> 5) if I had to start from scratch I would use the "legacy" APIs.
>
> There is also a great disconnect between what the WG is doing and what
> (web) application developers need, judging by the (lack of) involvement
> of that group.
>

We (Chrome WebRTC implementors) get a pretty continuous stream of feedback
from web app developers.  And some of us (myself included) are working on
both WebRTC implementations and web apps.  I started this thread trying to
distill down a summary of what we're hearing from web app developers most
often: they want more direct, low-level control.

But I agree it would be nice to have more app developers providing direct
input in the WG.

Your case of addStream vs addTrack is interesting: would you have been
better off if we (Chrome) had shipped ORTC (or something lower-level) first
rather than focusing on finishing addTrack (as we are currently doing)?


>
> I am still happy with Edge's take on ORTC even though given the lack of
> support in other browsers means that doing something as crazy as
> implementing RTCPeerConnection ontop of it is viable.
>
>