Google's WebRTC Open Communications Platform to Land in Chrome Soon

Google has always been a big believer in the web, but sometimes the technology was not yet there to serve the company's vision for its web apps. Most of the times, it took matter into its own hands and has created several projects which aim to provide a modern, technologically advanced and open alternative to plugins, desktop apps and proprietary technology.

The latest such example is WebRTC, the freshest project under the Web* umbrella, a real-time communications framework which, when completed, will enable web browsers and other applications to offer native communication capabilities for websites and web apps.

The project was announced last month and got a push earlier this month. Things are moving fast and now it's starting to make its way into Chrome with the goal of integrating WebRTC into the Google browser and the WebKit engine that powers it.

"We would like to announce that a new open source project is about to land in src/third_party/webrtc. All details about WebRTC in general can be found at http://www.webrtc.org/," Google's Henrik Andreasson announced in a Chrome mailing list.

"Our goal is to enable Chrome with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. We are working hard to provide full RTC support in Chrome all the way from WebKit down to the native audio and video parts," he explained.

WebRTC joins the rather controversial WebM, the open video format based on the VP8 codec Google open-sourced, and the more recent WebP, the image format also based on VP8 compression technology.

"When we are done, any web developer shall be able to create RTC applications, like the Google Talk client in Gmail, without using any plugins but only WebRTC components that runs in the sandbox," Google added.

There is quite some work to be done, but once it lands in WebKit, a plethora of browsers besides Chrome will be able to support the technology, including Safari, the Android browser and others, provided of course that the browser makers believe it's worth they're while. [via Cnet]