WebRTC Data Channels To Change The Way We Think About Data

For most of the interactive web applications, signaling between client endpoints has been a crucial aspect. In the field of HTML, most of the developers establish signaling via server side clients, websockets, and long polling. WebRTC data channels emerged for a high-performance data exchange. Data channels pave a way to send text/binary data to another peer over the browser. The API of the data channel is like websockets when it’s about sending various types of data. It works P-2-P and doesn’t require a centralized server.  

Why do we need another data channel?

There are already many like Websockets and AJAX. But Websocket is bidirectional, but rest of these technologies are created for communication from or to a server.

Types of data channels:

• Unreliable Data Channels: These are out of order message delivery that has no guarantee of delivery. However, unreliability also makes them faster.

• Reliable data channels: Guaranteed delivery. These are slower than the unreliable data channels.

Data channels have changed the way think about data

Managing large amounts of data can be a big hassle in JS. If someone transfers a file that is bigger than the amount of memory available, they’ll have to think about a new way to save that data. This is when technologies such as the FileSystem API come into play.

Developing a file sharing application

Developing a web application that can enable file sharing in the browser became possible with the data channel. Building on top of it directly means that the transferred file data is encrypted and doesn’t touch app provider’s servers.

The emergence of DataChannel can change the way we think about data transfer in the browser.