Re: Futures in WebRTC

On 6/4/13 10:59, cowwoc wrote:
> On 04/06/2013 11:57 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 8:39 AM, cowwoc <cowwoc@bbs.darktech.org 
>> <mailto:cowwoc@bbs.darktech.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     As an end-user, using DOM Futures was as simple as including the
>>     Polyfill JS. Thing is, if WebRTC is built into the browser, I'm
>>     guessing users would expect all dependencies (i.e. DOM Futures)
>>     to be built-in too.
>>
>>         Seeing as the polyfill JS is rather small. What prevents you
>>     vendors from folding this into the browser at the same time as WebRTC
>>
>>
>> Conversely, what prevents anyone who wishes to use a futures interface
>> from loading their own WebRTC Futures wrapper?
>>
>> -Ekr
>
>     Nothing, I guess, but it would be nice if this wrapper were 
> officially sanctioned and maintained by the standard. You could start 
> out this way and drop the legacy API (with callbacks) once you have a 
> better understanding of when vendors will implement DOM Futures.

Here's what I don't quite get here. The design of futures contains an 
explicit goal of being able to be retrofitted onto existing 
callback-based interfaces. In my book, this makes it an interesting 
design pattern, and nothing more. I don't see why one would expect 
vendor support for Futures any more than they would expect support for 
Facades, Flyweights, Proxies, Chains of Responsibility, Mementos, 
Visitors, or any number of other useful patterns.

If you find futures easy to work with, go to town -- wrap 
RTCPeerConnection in Futures and use them all over your app. It's a 
trivial exercise. But I'm somewhat boggled why we think this rises to 
the level of standardization.

/a