[Building Sakai] Video/audio calls on sakai chat portal

[Charles Severance]

On Mar 4, 2013, at 12:27 PM, Alex Balleste wrote:

> Yes, it works over NAT. You can provide an array of stun/turn server to solve this problem. Stun and turn servers are used by the ICE framework to face up with NAT and other network walls.  ICE is the responsible to connect the peers. The first it tries is to connect them directly using UDP, if it's not possible then it relies on stun servers to make possible the connection through NAT. In that demo we used one of the Google public stun servers, but you would be able to use any kind of stun server (I never tried).

It seems like the stun servers are the rate limiting factor here.   I would want to make sure that we think though through the mostly disconnected and behind-the firewall use cases and at least have a plan to solve them.  I also would like to make sure that if a university happened to put up a stun server that it could be locked down to be only used to facilitate interactions between their known clients (i.e. those integrating in Sakai) - authenticated stun as it were.    It would be bad if some university put up a stun server and became a major pirate content forwarder inadvertently.

All in all - this has lovely potential - in a sense, our portal chat does not have a heavy legacy :)  It does not have to work in 2005 :)  A very nice feature that works most of the itme that can be enabled or disabled would be quite a differentiator.

We also might want to structure the code so that it is in an include file in a way that allows multiple extensions to portal chat like this instead of just putting inline code into the base files and then turning it on and off with a property.  There could be multiple implementations over time - it would be nice to swap them in and out without massive patches spread across many files.

thinking out loud.

/Chuck

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