Behind the Scenes: How GoBrunch Adopted WebRTC, Sockets and SVGs

There are several ways to choose a technology for a startup website. We always believed that GoBruch is more than a simple videoconference or webinar platform. It's a promising community to share knowledge. In one hand, we wanted to avoid using paid SaaS, since this was going to be a free website. In the other, we were studying different possibilities to implement sockets through the web pages, with multi-tab capabilities. We ended up choosing node.js as the back-end server, including all sockets management. The technology used for the live video in the browser (called WebRTC) is quite new, dated from 2009. There is a huge lack of information online, which made us to rethink the architecture many times, guided by the promise to cover large audiences. After some study, we chose one of the few available frameworks and customized it a lot, in order to work following the Selected Forwarded Unit concept. Thinking about providing a different virtual experience to the user, we also explored a wide range of features offered by SVG (Scaled Vector Graphics), including the possibility to allow the user to choose a "seat" in a meeting room. Check the results at https://gobrunch.com