I’ve done a lot of voice WebRTC with elixir. Typically, the media path for WebRTC is from browser to browser, and the server is not included in the media path unless you need to have the server in the middle of the media path. Phoenix channels are great for the WebRTC signalling portion to setup the media path. I have not used data channels yet, but can’t imagine that they are much different than voice or video.

If you need to anchor the media path on the server, your going to have some difficulties with Elixir/Erlang. Current browsers require that the WebRTC media path use DTLS (TLS over UDP). The last time I checked (6 months ago), there was NO support for DTLS in erlang.

I have a simple Phoenix WebRTC demo project on github you may want to checkout.

Steve

I’m not sure if using Phoenix for accepting UDP makes sense. Phoenix endpoint is powered by Cowboy, so TCP is always underneath. UDP is connectionless, so even if it can somehow be integrated directly into endpoint, I think it would be a needless complication.

If the system needs to handle UDP next to TCP traffic, I’d just start a separate process powered by gen_udp. I think it can even listen on the same port as the endpoint, as the networking protocols are different.

@hubertlepicki While it might be possible to do this with phoenix, it might not be the best idea - I forgot to add that to my response So I fully agree with you here.

@sasajuric I don’t think the channel has to be started by the cowboy. The transport implementation controls this entirely.

It may be worth noting that DTLS-support now is in beta in OTP20.