Use webrtc as transport instead of TCP

[traverseda]

Using webrtc as a default transport would let web-based clients communicate with one another, peer-to-peer, without an the user needing to install a desktop app.

[staltz]

But you also need a database :)

[traverseda]

Yeah, mostly I didn't want to open up a bunch of issues for the different parts untill I saw how this was received. IndexedDB is available in most relevent browsers now, and there are filesystem implementations built on top of it. I don't imagine porting flume to be a huge problem. They also recently increased performance of write operations, so the "many small writes" might just work better now?

As an aside, I missed #179 during my search, because I was looking specifically for webrtc.

[staltz]

We've had efforts to build scuttlebot on top of indexeddb but it's pretty bad quality when compared to leveldb. I haven't been involved with the implementation but I heard there are a lot of problems with it. And regarding WebRTC, @pietgeursen is working on doing that

[cryptix]

Instead? I find that a bit over the top.

IIRC one also needs a signaling server to make a sctp-wrapped-in-udp connection. Pubs could do that but last time I checked we wanted to reduce their importance..

[dominictarr]

@traverseda we do intend to support webrtc (and utp) as well as tcp and ws, see
https://github.com/ssbc/multiserver/
but there are some hoops to jump through, and I've heard reports that webrtc is really heavy (you can crash a browser by just by creating lots of connections)

Also, indexeddb is slow in my measurements, but if we had a polyfil for https://github.com/flumedb/flumeview-reduce and https://github.com/flumedb/flumeview-level we could at least get something running. Any help here would be much appreciated! getting the secure-scuttlebutt tests passing in a browser context should be the first objective

[Serkan-devel]

But isn't WebRTC built on top of TCP? And what database does ssb use?

[fermuch]

@Serkan-devel WebRTC can work with both UDP and TCP. Peer connections AFAIK use SCTP, which runs on top of UDP.

[traverseda]

But isn't WebRTC built on top of TCP? And what database does ssb use?

Yes, WebRTC is built on top of TCP. But if SSB is running in a web-browser, it can't use TCP directly, in can only use a limited subset of protocols, most of which are built on top of TCP.

I am presuming that someone is going to write a TCP over webRTC implementation any day now...

[Serkan-devel]

But under which license?