It’s nice to see various implementations of SIP on the Web; .I also wrote about the interworking of SIP and WebRTC sometime ago. Below is an excerpt from the concluding part in my doctoral thesis.

In summary, while session handoff has been widely explored, content sharing and the proxy services are relatively new services in the Web-browsing context. These services could encourage collaboration and community interaction between the Internet users. In addition, having shown that the integration of a SIP stack into a Web browser makes no significant change on the memory footprint or quality of experience, the inclusion of SIP in commercial Web browsers is not only feasible, but also will offer new services to end users. SIP is an extensible protocol that is not only used in multimedia services provisioning, but also in control and automation, such as smart homes. Should Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Standards be widely adopted, many more innovative solutions, like this project, would be introduced into the Web browsing experience and found in this Web 2.0 era as services are rapidly converging.

SIP is good at what it does, and the future is the web .

The event will take place in one of the tertiary institutions in Lagos, Nigeria and its website is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Nigeria. If you are interested, please drop me a comment.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been writing the app in HTML5. By the way, I used HTML5 to write my ePortfolio last year, and I liked it. For the mobile app, the <video> tag wouldn’t work the way we wanted it to work. Below is the part that plays video files.

<video id=”video_control” controls=”controls” autoplay=”autoplay”>
<source src=”<?php echo $_GET["vid"]; ?>” type=”video/mp4″ />
<source src=”<?php echo $_GET["vid"]; ?>” type=”video/x-msvideo” />
<source src=”<?php echo $instmedialist->getflashurl($_GET["vid"]); ?>” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>
<embed id=”video_control”  src=”<?php echo $instmedialist->getflashurl($_GET["vid"]); ?>” />
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

We’ve tested the application on various browsers, and the result is amazing. It revealed that the browser war isn’t over. Browsers (both mobile and desktop versions) will keep behaving differently. Video containers (such as AVI, OGG and MP4) wrap video files with different codecs; as a result, browsers can’t always play certain video files with using a plug-in. The containers and codecs used for the videos in this project are AVI(and FFmpeg MPEG-4 codec) and MP4(and MPEG-4 video codec). We couldn’t get any of the videos to play, most notably the MP4 files, without a plug-in. So, we got the Apple Quicktime. But none of the browsers save Safari would load quicktime over a small area of their rendering surfaces or their entire rendering surfaces.Below are the inferences we made from the work.

Firefox loads quicktime plug-in and plays the video ONLY in its entire rendering area

In conclusion, H.264 seemed to be the de-facto codec but not all browsers support it. And when a plug-in is required, some browsers just won’t load the right/required plug-in. I am not sure if it’s a problem with the <video> tag, my lines of code (which I doubt!) or the codecs used. However, if we really want to embrace the awesomeness of the <video> tag, we need to have some codecs supported by all browsers without going to fetch a plug-in. By the way, I am also looking forward to opening a PDF document in a browser without a plug-inas promised by HTML5; I know there are many works in progress on all these issues. Above all, HTML5 makes web app development for desktop and mobile devices fun.

References:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-tells-us-and-why-were-standing-with-the-web/

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/embed_audio_and_video_in_html_5_pages/

http://html5doctor.com/the-video-element/

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Media_formats_supported_by_the_audio_and_video_elements

http://html5test.com/

http://www.w3.org/html/wiki/FAQs

http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/video#Formats_and_Codecs

None of these projects is easy to deploy. I spent days trying to get them to work. After experimenting with a number of them, I decided to focus on OpenStack. OpenStack is a full-fledged cloud computing software with services, such as Image and Identity services. In addition, it is a suite offered by the same team. One could choose to use all its components or  use some of them with other solutions – Amazon EC2, BoxGrinder, e.t.c. It can however be used to deliver a massively scalable cloud operating system. Getting the OpenStack basic services (glance for image service and nova for compute, network, scheduler and volume services) up and running seems easy; but things start getting difficult (and messy) when one tries to integrate its dashboard (called Horizon). Integrating its dashboard requires installing the Identity component (called Keystone). In addition, one would need to get Glance to authenticate with Keystone. Getting the whole suite working would require one starting a number of services, pretty much like running the OpenIMSCore.

Below are some screenshots of the dashboard showing, among other things, the instances limit and the instance(s) running on the test machine. OpenStack has also been tested with BoxGrinder. Many thanks to the members of the CPUT CRDOT and guys at the OpenStack IRC channel for their help.

WebRTC is an open framework that offers web application developers the ability to write rich real-time multimedia applications (e.g. video and gaming applications) on the web without requiring plugins or extensions. Its purpose is to help build a strong Real Time Communication (RTC) platform that works across multiple web browsers and platforms. In an implementation, the WebRTC API will abstract several key components for real-time audio, video, networking and signal [1, 2].

One of the IETF RTCWEB WG [3] is currently discussing how to integrate WebRTC with deployed SIP equipment and domains. An area of its application is being able to communicate from WebRTC applications to existing deployed SIP/RTP-based Voice/Video-over-IP devices at the signalling and media planes. It may require an interworking middlebox function (e.g. an integrated Web Server module) in the media-plane. However, the deployed devices should communicate using SIP at a signaling layer rather than HTTP. Other protocol implementations, such as XMPP and H.323, can also be achieved.

From the industry perspective, the web browser software industry is also implementing browser-to-browser interaction in various ways. Although WebRTC is currently being standardized, it is however possible that some of the its implementations might require extending an existing terminal (like a web client in our work), a proxy or a server.

References

1. WebRTC, http://www.webrtc.org, Accessed on November 20, 2011.
2. IETF WebRTC, http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb, Accessed on November 20, 2011.
3. IETF RTCWeb-SIP WG, http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kaplan-rtcweb-sip-interworking-requirements-01, Accessed on November 20, 2011.

We would like to inform you about the unconference CPUT InfoTech ’11 coming up at the Department of Information Technology, CPUT. Below are the three tracks of the unconference.

Time: 11.30am – 1pm
Date: Oct 4 – 5, 2011

Presenters:
1. Alacrity.co.za will talk on enterprise Java applications, J2ME, Ruby on Rails and demo a C# product.

The CPUT Software House

Introduction
The CPUT Software House is in its premature stage at the moment. Currently referred to as the CPUT Centre for Research and Development in Open Technology (CRDOT), it is made of over 10 students across different levels. It focuses on teaching the students skills required in the industry using Open Technologies. In addition, it collaborates with firms, parastatals and NGOs to provide solutions to their immediate problems. It is currently working with the Material Science Research Group, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa to port a health application from the Windows Operating System to the Andriod Operating System. The application, on completion, will run on a mobile device, for example an Internet tablet PC, that runs the Andriod OS.

Online Presence

• The CRDOT has a web presence at http://www.ngportal.com/cputcrdot/.

• In addition, it runs an IRC channel #crdot at the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

• Its group mail (Google Group) is at http://groups.google.com/group/cputcrdot.

• It is in the process of moving it application servers to a local server (in South Africa) at the IP 196.211.3.108.

Partners
The centre is also closely working with various research groups and communities around the globe, such as the Serval Community, Flinder’s University, Australia; the CDOT, Seneca College, Canada and the VillageTelco, South Africa.

In closing, the centre is working hard to expand in terms of getting more students involved, getting additional servers, which will reside in the school and having a laboratory of its own in the school.

There are a number of efforts to access or run a Win. 32 app on Andriod. The task has been accomplished in the Linux OS environment with the availability of programs, such as WINE. And virtualization is another way of accessing a Win. 32 app on a Linux box. Although work is underway to access or run a Win. 32 app on Andriod, there is no package or solution in the public domain to say the task has been accomplished. A virtual PC client for ARM devices on a smartphone might work. Another solution would be to write a PC program that could convert a Win. 32 app .exe to Android .apk. It would have to decompile the windows package, recompile and repackage to Android. Hence, the ways of accessing or running a Win. 32 app on Andriod would include using a middleware (like Wine), a virtualization client and a program that recompiles the Win. 32 app for Andriod.

Any student interested in this project should please contact me. The project will be funded by the CSIR Materials Science and Manufacturing, South Africa

References:
1. http://www.android-x86.org/