Ally MacDonald

21st century communication with WebRTC

Engaging in-depth on the web with peer-to-peer connections.

As the web platform continues to evolve, tools have emerged for connecting people and computers in new and interesting ways. Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) stands out as one of the most significant and disruptive of these emerging technologies, allowing developers to embed peer-to-peer real-time communication in the browser without proprietary plugins, while breaking away from the traditional client-server paradigm.

Since Google released and open-sourced the WebRTC project in early 2011, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have been working together to formalize the WebRTC standard and 1.0 stable release. Companies like Twilio and Vidyo have adopted WebRTC as a protocol for video chat in the browser, and established telco and VoIP players such as Cisco, Ericsson, and Telefónica have also lent support to the project.

At the most recent meeting of the IETF, Simon Pietro Romano, author of Real-Time Communication with WebRTC, hosted a panel to discuss developments in the WebRTC community and the road ahead. The panel, who are driving forces behind ongoing standardization and implementation, included:

  • Justin Uberti, tech lead for the WebRTC team at Google
  • Eric Rescorla of Mozilla
  • Dan Burnett, editor of the PeerConnection and getUserMedia W3C WEBRTC specification
  • Cullen Jennings, Cisco Fellow and Co-Chair of the IETF RTCWeb

I’d encourage you to listen to the whole conversation, but to get started, you might explore these highlights.

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Respond and redirect with PHP

An excerpt from the third edition of PHP Cookbook

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from the third edition of PHP Cookbook by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg. For those already familiar with PHP, PHP Cookbook shows you how to overcome specific problems in your everyday work. Programmers coming from other languages will also find recipes helpful which demonstrate how to accomplish a particular task in PHP, such as sending email or parsing JSON, that you may already know how to do in another language. The recipes are self-contained in a simple problem-solution-discussion format with explanations of how and why the code works the way it does.

This cookbook arms PHP developers with important information for key PHP updates, particularly data manipulation, web services, internationalization, database access, security, and testing. This excerpt, from the chapter focused on Web Fundamentals, demonstrates how to set the HTTP Status Code and how to redirect a user to a different web page than the one they requested. Portions of this chapter have been edited and condensed for the purposes of this excerpt.
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Polyglot Programming: What Is It and Why Should You Be Using It?

An Interview with Neal Ford

I recently interviewed O’Reilly author Neal Ford (Functional Thinking, The Productive Programmer) on the subject of polyglot programming. In 2006, Neal wrote a blog post which resurrected the term, suggesting that as modern applications become more complex, it is important for developers to leverage knowledge of multiple languages and use the right tool for the job. In the interview, we discuss the benefits and challenges of polyglot programming, how it has evolved in recent years, and the impact it’s had on software development.

Some key highlights in our conversation include:

  • What is polyglot programming? [Discussed at 0:15]
  • What are some of the benefits? [Discussed at 1:39]
  • How polyglot programming has affected software development in recent years [Discussed at 4:25]
  • Downsides to polyglot programming? What are the trade-offs? [Discussed at 6:22]
  • Best practices when starting out in polyglot programming [Discussed at 8:58]
  • Where is polyglot going? The pervasiveness of JavaScript… [Discussed at 10:32]
  • Resources for keeping up on trends and new technologies [Discussed at 12:48]

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