[asterisk-biz] Ribbit.com ?

[Matthew Rubenstein]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 23:02 +0100, Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 16:38 -0500, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 21:55 +0100, Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 15:41 -0500, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> > > > 	Why is it taking so long for OSS SIP or IAX clients embeddable in web
> > > > pages? There's one or two products out there, while desktop clients are
> > > > fairly plentiful. If "Web VoIP" clients were as plentiful as, say, MP3
> > > > players, then the "Voice Web" would be growing probably as fast as the
> > > > Web itself once did.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > What are the two?  FreeSWITCH.org is a library, that happens to ship
> > > with a very small program that launches the core.  This is embeddable in
> > > anything that can talk to a C library.  This runs in windows (ce, xp,
> > > 2003, etc), osx, linux, solaris, etc.  It has many advantages and you
> > > can write apps in spidermonkey (mozillas javascript), but then the same
> > > author also did res_js for asterisk :)  Its mpl so someone could in
> > > theory take it, embed it and sell it if they really wanted to, or keep
> > > it open if they wanted to, freedom is a wonderful thing :)
> > > 
> > > There may be more projects than just two, its just that many arent as
> > > well known as the desktop stuff.
> > 
> > 	I'm talking about embeddable in (arbitrary, not preinstalled with
> > browser plugins) Web pages, which means Java or Flash applets. The one
> > that came to mind was Mexuar's, and I allowed for the possibility that
> > there might be another with which I'm just not familiar.
> 
> Yeah this would have to be done as a plugin, which becomes browser and
> platform specific, although in all reality you could do what gizmo did
> and just use the flash capability to access the mic and send it that way
> and define your own channel type.  Gizmo streams audio to port 443, and
> while they have some app that loads on your box my guess is that its for
> their limiting stuff more than it is for control of audio.  
> 
> It would not be that trivial to do a proper sip client in flash since
> you should do stun to resolve nat issues, look up SRV records, and all
> of that.  Although you could cheat with stun and do connections to
> webpages that return xml of the IP trivially, and then use the
> actionscript xmlparser stuff to get the values.  Signalling for sip by
> rfc is supposed to be both udp and tcp, although if its special purpose
> you could do what asterisk does and ignore the tcp part of the required
> section of the rfc.  
> 
> It appears that flash does not speak udp, I may be wrong I am not a
> flash monkey, but that would make it very difficult to implement a rtp
> stack.  This means that you would have to be creative if there is packet
> loss, namely when you do get audio just drop it until you are caught up
> on wall clock time.
> 
> As a side note you can stream mp3 right into a channel with FreeSWITCH
> so you can actually hook a very minimal flash client up, and because you
> have xml-rpc control over a FreeSWITCH box, or event-socket, or a
> variety of other ways to interface with it, you can programatically
> control all aspects of the call.  This means that you could, if you
> really wanted to do like gizmo and stream audio to it for calls.  
> 
> You can support IM with both jabber and sip (even have a text based ivr)
> so that can give people the means to authenticate, call, and do whatever
> else if you wanted to do it that way.  
> 
> In my opinion getting the audio is the trivial part, although getting a
> server that can talk to that and process it in a clustered environment
> with full RTP failover should someone unplug the box accidentally :)  or
> whatever is not that difficult either.

	Why not a Java applet with local codecs? Mexuar does it with IAX, and
there are existing Java SIP clients (though they're locally installed
applications, not applets). Sure the download would take time, but then
the applet would be cached. Anyway, a SIP or IAX applet would be a good
one to leave running on a page for a while, worth the initial download.
Which doesn't seem to impede player MP3 applets.


> This would have been better on-list :)

	Your wish is my request :).
-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein