Building a WebRTC Video Chat Application with SimpleWebRTC

Build a live video chat application based on SimpleWebRTC

This book "6 JavaScript Projects" contains this article, aiming to help you gain insight into modern JavaScript development. With the rise of WebRTC and the enhanced ability of browsers to handle real-time point-to-point communication, building real-time applications is easier than ever. This tutorial will explore SimpleWebRTC and how it can simplify our work when implementing WebRTC. Throughout the process, we will build a WebRTC video chat application with messaging capabilities.

If you need background knowledge on WebRTC and peer-to-peer communication, it is recommended to read "Dawn of WebRTC" and "A Beginner of GetUserMedia API".

Core points

• SimpleWebRTC is a JavaScript library that simplifies the implementation of WebRTC and makes it easier to create real-time video and audio applications that can run on different browsers without writing browser-specific code.
• This tutorial demonstrates how to build a video chat application using SimpleWebRTC, which involves setting up a single page application on an Express server and requires Node.js and npm for dependency management.
• Key dependencies include SimpleWebRTC, Semantic UI CSS for style settings, jQuery for DOM operations, Handlebars for templates, and Express as a web server.
• The application supports creating and joining chat rooms, sending messages, and processing multiple video streams, demonstrating SimpleWebRTC's ability to manage complex point-to-point communication scenarios.
• Applications can be easily deployed using Zeit's now CLI tool, allowing quick setup and public sharing of applications.
• This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on how to build a feature-rich real-time communication application using SimpleWebRTC, highlighting the ease of use and cross-browser compatibility of the library.

What is SimpleWebRTC?

It is important to understand the main tools we will use before continuing. SimpleWebRTC is a JavaScript library that simplifies WebRTC point-to-point data, video and audio calls.

SimpleWebRTC acts as a wrapper for the browser WebRTC implementation. As you may already know, browser vendors do not fully agree with a single approach to implementing different functions, which means that each browser has a different WebRTC implementation. As a developer, you have to write different code for each browser that you plan to support. SimpleWebRT acts as a wrapper for this code. Its exposed API is easy to use and understand, which makes it an excellent choice for implementing cross-browser WebRTC.

Build WebRTC video chat application

It's time to build your app hands-on. We will build a single page application that runs on the Express server.

Please note that you can download the code for this tutorial from our GitHub repository. To run it or follow it at home, you need to install Node and npm. If you are not familiar with these or need installation help, please check out our previous tutorial:

• Install multiple versions of Node.js using nvm
• Npm Getting Started Guide—Node Package Manager

You also need a computer or laptop with a webcam. If not, you need a USB webcam that can be connected to the top of the monitor. You may need a friend or a second device to test the remote connection.

Dependencies

We will use the following dependencies to build our project:

• SimpleWebRTC — WebRTC Library
• Semantic UI CSS — An elegant CSS framework
• jQuery — Used to select elements and event processing on the page.
• Handlebars — A JavaScript template library that we will use to generate HTML for messages
• Express — NodeJS server.

Project Settings

Go to your workspace and create a folder called simplewebrtc-messenger. Open the folder in VSCode or your favorite editor and create the following file and folder structure:

<code>simplewebrtc-messenger
├── public
│   ├── images
│   │   └── image.png
│   ├── index.html
│   └── js
│       └── app.js
├── README.md
└── server.js</code>

Or, if you prefer, you can do the same via the command line:

<code>mkdir -p simplewebrtc-messenger/public/{images,js}
cd simplewebrtc-messenger
touch public/js/app.js public/index.html .gitignore README.md server.js</code>

Open README.md and copy the following:

<code># Simple WebRTC Messenger

A tutorial on building a WebRTC video chat app using SimpleWebRTC.</code>

If you plan to use a git repository, add node_modules to the .gitignore file. Use the following command to generate the package.json file:

<code>npm init -y</code>

You should get the following output:

{
  "name": "simplewebrtc-messenger",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "A tutorial on building a WebRTC video chat app using SimpleWebRTC.",
  "main": "server.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "start": "node server.js"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Let's install our dependencies now:

<code>npm install express handlebars jquery semantic-ui-css simplewebrtc</code>

During installation, copy this code to server.js:

const express = require('express');

const app = express();
const port = 3000;

// 设置公共文件夹为根目录
app.use(express.static('public'));

// 从客户端提供对node_modules文件夹的访问
app.use('/scripts', express.static(`${__dirname}/node_modules/`));

// 将所有流量重定向到index.html
app.use((req, res) => res.sendFile(`${__dirname}/public/index.html`));

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.info('listening on %d', port);
});

The server code is very standard. Just read the comments to see what is going on.

Next, let's set the public/index.html file:

(The index.html code should be inserted here, and due to space limitations, it is omitted here. Please refer to the original text to obtain the complete code)

Next, let's set up the basic client JavaScript code. Copy this code to public/js/app.js:

window.addEventListener('load', () => {
  // 将所有客户端代码放在这里
});

Finally, download this image from our GitHub repository and save it to the public/images folder.

Now we can run our application:

<code>npm start</code>

Open URL in your browser localhost:3000, and you should see the following:

(Image should be inserted here, due to space limitations, omitted here. Please refer to the original text to obtain the picture)

(The following content continues to process the code segments similarly according to the original text structure. Due to space limitations, all subsequent code segments and pictures are omitted here. Please refer to the original text for the complete code and pictures.)

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned SimpleWebRTC and how to use it to create a live application. Specifically, we created a messaging application that allows users to send text and make video calls to remote peers. SimpleWebRTC is a great cross-browser library that can easily implement WebRTC in web applications.

Don't forget that the code used in this tutorial is available on GitHub. Clone it, create something cool and have fun!

(The FAQ part is omitted here, due to space limitations, it is omitted here. Please refer to the original text for the complete FAQ content.)

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