Codassium, an online code platform by Wreally Studios, allows for two parties to conduct a coding session using Mozilla’s “Ace” editor alongside live video chat for increased collaboration.
The platform uses the WebRTC standard currently being proposed by W3C who is hoping to use it to provide a web-based suite of tools to share data, audio, and video all in real-time across multiple devices.
Moving beyond collaborative work, this platform could potentially be used to conduct live interviews for programming candidates remotely ensuring a quality-standard is met for positions.
Wreally Studios has chosen an apt time to release such a product as the rise of what is casually known as “brogramming” – teaming up with a friend on coding projects – gains popularity.
To use Codassium a WebRTC-supported browser is required; latest versions of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome will work just fine.
Both Mozilla and Google, generally rivals in the browser-world, have teamed up in support of W3C’s latest standard. WebRTC creates a direct peer-to-peer connection bypassing a central server which supersedes popular services like Skype.
The demo of their partnership is available on Google Code if you’d like to peruse what goes into the app, or if you’d just like to try it out it’s available here using Google’s app engine.
Microsoft has proposed its own rival to the standard by the name of CU-RTC-WEB, but as of yet has not gotten any further. This competing standard may fall short if both Mozilla and Google (whose browsers combined result in around 80% of internet users) support W3C’s WebRTC.
Do you think Codassium will become a useful tool for development? Is WebRTC an exciting standard with prospect to change online communication and collaboration?
