Browser-to-Browser WebRTC connection demo using matchbox-socket

[johnny-smitherson]

There is this browser WebRTC library called matchbox that wraps low level webrtc calls in a simpler interface. The implementation there used a custom websocket server to pass around WebRTC offer and accept messages; I managed to replace that centralized websocket server with your network components.

This means one can use a combination of these 2 components to achieve direct browser-to-browser & browser-to-native connections of reliable or unreliable type, so we can keep heavy traffic off iroh network relays.

I'm wondering if you would be interested to have a port of that demo into this example repository, or if you would like to reference that demo with a link.

I'm also curious what sort of changes would take to add matchbox-socket as a custom transport into iroh directly, but that's a whole different subject we can explore after the demos are finalized. I do see a recurring conversation about webrtc and mention of webrtc future plans in blog posts

Also, review and comments for the iroh-related code in the pull request over there would be greatly appreciated

• related code: Custom signaller + example johanhelsing/matchbox#485
• related ticket: Custom Signaller Implementation johanhelsing/matchbox#484

[matheus23]

Thanks for letting us know about these things. Really interesting!

I think we'll take a look at that. One worry is that by shipping a whole WebRTC implementation in native nodes, we'll blow up code size for all users of iroh a little too much.
Still, it'd be interesting to see how far we can get with a matchbox_socket integration into iroh (that'd be basically hacking on a fork of iroh for a bit to see how well everything works).

I'll take a look at the ticket and PR over there ✌️