Video Conferencing Team Collaboration Collaboration Devices Engineering

Embedding  Webex Teams Meetings with the  JavaScript  SDK 

Dec 02, 2019 — Chris DuBois

We’ve brought  Webex  Teams video conferencing to an open source  JavaScript  SDK, using Cisco and open source technologies, allowing developers to create and customize their own media applications in the web rapidly.

 Vibrant Ecosystem 

As the line between the browser and the operating system continues to blur, JavaScript-accessible technologies are becoming more powerful.  WebRTC  is one of the most dominant examples of this paradigm shift, minimizing the barrier to entry for media development,  and it’s on your everyday average web browser. 

Since 2016, an estimated two billion browsers were installed that support WebRTC.  Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all support WebRTC standards, with Edge support on its way. This has empowered developers all over the world to build complex media related applications in the browser of their choice.  It is clear the future direction of video conferencing applications, media exchange, and the like will be built here, right in your web browser. 

Leveraging and Expanding 

We, at Cisco,  are utilizing  this burgeoning technology stack to create solutions in  Webex  Teams for high quality, secure meeting collaboration. In our environment, we see over 90,000 Webex Teams meetings using WebRTC per month. 

Meetings  via the browser makes it possible to engage in real time video communication in Cisco’s powerful media network and with no installations, no browser plugins, and a familiar native app proficiency. In fact,  Webex  Teams  extends basic WebRTC calling to improve quality of service and adapt to network inconsistencies in order to provide the best quality web conferencing experience possible. 

Now we are taking this a step further, bringing  Webex  Meetings to an open source  JavaScript  SDK.  In a collaborative effort, we’ve combined the knowledge of our teams and over the course of a few months have released an open source tool that has all the capabilities of the  Webex Teams Web Client  today, in a flexible API format.  It  is  built to be platform independent, and is supported wherever WebRTC runs, even mobile browsers such as Chrome on Android, and Safari on iOS.  Some example features are joining a  Webex meeting, recording  meetings in the cloud, sharing  your screen, managing  a roster, and accessing  meeting statistics.  Groups  inside of Cisco have already started to bring these custom capabilities to new applications.  

Endless Possibilities 

Developers can now customize and integrate  video conferencing  into their applications rapidly.  The wealth of use cases to create for is endless. Imagine applications that enabled single use calls such as a doctor taking an ad hoc patient call, coordinating meetings with external vendors using just a link, or bringing thousands of people to a simulcast in an instant. What if we brought meetings to the billions of IoT devices and had collaboration from a refrigerator or a car in an instant? The combined power of the SDK and the Webex web clients will make all this possible.  

What’s Next 

We believe WebRTC is an important tool in the present and future of real time media. We are investing in building higher quality audio/video, more flexible and powerful APIs through the SDK, and more unified experiences in the clients through actively developing solutions for these everyday problems.