Re: Summary of "What is missing for building real services" thread

On 17/01/2014 12:42 PM, Iñaki Baz Castillo wrote:
> 2014/1/17 cowwoc <cowwoc@bbs.darktech.org>:
>> That's not what I'm talking about or asking for.
>>
>> I'm not talking about "one library to rule all" but rather a reference
>> implementation by one of the vendors (I used Google as an example because
>> their implementation is already up on webrtc.org). Nothing would prevent
>> others from coming up with alternate libraries, or forking Google's.
>>
>> I'm just saying that we should have *at least one* Native API that mirrors
>> the Javascript API.
> No. We need specifications and standards. And if there is interest
> then smart guys will develop libraries/stacks based on those
> specifications (in different programming languages) by providing the
> API they want (because I'm very sure you have never requested to
> Asterisk and FreeSwitch, or Apache and Nginx, that they must offer the
> same API).

I'm saying the specification must lock down the JS API, and in parallel 
the Native API should try to mirror the capabilities of the JS API but 
that is an asynchronous process outside the scope of the specification.

To reiterate: the point of this API is *not* code portability but rather 
a baseline or proof of concept showing *one way* to implement each one 
of the features. Meaning: I am not asking all vendors to use the same 
API design, but I am saying we should put out a *reference 
implementation* that shows them an example of how it can be done.

> But you cannot tell to a W3C or IETF group that "we need a reference
> implementation". If the specs are good then you DO NOT need to learn
> from the code of others, nor to copy it.

Not true. Regardless of how good the spec is, it takes a non-trivial 
amount of time/effort to implement the spec from the ground up and most 
of pieces are not interesting from an innovation point of view. We 
should be able to reuse code from the reference implementation (avoid 
reinventing the wheel) for components that we don't care about, and 
focus our innovation/effort on components *we do* care about. Right now 
it's an all-or-nothing thing, which is a waste of the community's time.

> Honestly, if we need to use Google WebRTC code for every WebRTC
> project then that means that the specifications are BAD (how can it be
> different after mandating the usage of the painful SDP O/A?).

Again, you don't *need* it, but it's there for you if you want to reuse 
some of the code. For example, the existence of an open-source database 
(e.g. PostgreSQL) does not preclude the existence of commercial 
implementations such as SQL Server.

Gili

Received on Friday, 17 January 2014 17:50:19 UTC