Jesús Leganés Combarro "piranna" - [piranna@gmail.com]
WebP2P is a Peer-to-Peer signaling channel framework mainly focused on the easy development of P2P applications in pure Javascript. This code was formerly part of ShareIt! pure Javascript P2P filesharing application, winner of the Universitary Free Software Championship 2013, and now it's part as a standalone library of the ShareIt project.
If you fork the project (specially if you want to do modifications) please send me an email just to let me know about your progress :-)
WebRTC specification lacks of a signaling channel to interconnect two peers, leaving up to the developer what to use instead, being this an intermediary web server via Ajax or WebSockets, a chat room, or also pigeons. It needs a signaling channel, it lacks a signaling channel: WebP2P is that missing signaling channel.
WebP2P abstract all this signaling channels used to connect two peers ("handshake" channels), leaving only a simple API that just give you a WebRTC PeerConnection object connected with the other desired peer ready to use. Also, its protocol is capable to connect two peers using another ones as intermediary handshake channels using WebRTC [DataChannels] (http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html#rtcdatachannel), leaving to you to only need to think what your P2P application will do.
Code is distributed as a NPM package. You can download it just executing npm install webp2p from your command line. After that, WebP2P and all its dependencies will be installed. You can also build a browser specific version using Grunt, just exec from the root folder node_modules/.bin/grunt and it will generate a browser ready version on the /dist folder.
Using require() just returns a WebP2P constructor. Calling this one creates a new object that will manage the connections with all the handshake channels and with other peers. For the most basic usage, you'll only need the connectTo() method and the peerconnection event. On success, both will give you a connected WebRTC PeerConnection object.
var WebP2p = require('webp2p');
var handshake_servers = <server connection data>;
// Peer 1
var options1 =
{
sessionID: 'peer 1',
handshake_servers: handshake_servers
};
var peer1 = new WebP2P(options1);
peer1.on('peerconnection', function(peerConnection)
{
console.log('Connected to peer 2');
});
// Peer 2
var options2 =
{
sessionID: 'peer 2',
handshake_servers: handshake_servers
};
var peer2 = new WebP2P(options2);
peer2.on('connected', function()
{
peer2.connectTo('peer 1', function(peerConnection)
{
console.log('Connected to peer 1');
});
});WebP2P is heavily tested using QUnit. Once you have downloaded all its dependencies and generated the browser version, just open the file test/index.html on a WebRTC enabled browser connected to internet. This last requeriment is due because tests run against external handshake servers. Currently is being used primarily PubNub, it's being researched to use some more standard and distributed handshake protocols in an annonimous way so this single-point-of-failure could be dropped.
Alternatively, you can test it from command line using npm test thanks to the node-webrtc package, but due to their alpha status, it's not guaranted to work. Node.js support is maintained up to date as future proof, through.
If you'd like to discuss P2P web applications further, send an email to
and you'll be part of the discussion mailing list! ([Archives here] (http://librelist.com/browser/webp2p/)).
All this code is under the Affero GNU General Public License. I am willing to relicense it under the BSD/MIT/Apache license, I simply ask that you email me and tell me why. I'll almost certainly agree.
Patches graciously accepted!