Boardroom-io

Remote collaborative whiteboarding

###Rationale

There are currently a number of excellent tools that enable developers to colaborate remotely on code. However, whiteboarding is an important element of the design process, and at the present, there is a lack of solutions that allow developers to collaborate remotely on handwritten diagrams.

Getting started

1. Run npm install to install dependencies
2. Run npm run front-end-build to transpile and bundle the client-side code. Gulp will watch for changes in the client-side Javascript and automatically rebundle when it detects a change.
3. Run npm start to start the server. Nodemon will automatically restart the server if it detects a change in the server side code.

Connecting to the Boardroom

Boardroom-io incorporates WebRTC technology in order to allow clients to exchange video, audio, text, and canvas data. However, WebRTCs video and audio APIs are currently disallowed when the clients are connected to an insecure server, due to security concerns. Therefore, in order to test Boardroom-io from a local http server, it is necessary to deactivate some of the security features of Google Chrome (see here for more details). To deactivate the security features on Google Chrome on Mac OSX, do the following:

1. Record the private IP address (on the local network) of the computer that is running the server.
2. From a different computer connected to the same network, run Google Chrome from the command line, including the --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure=<IP Address of server computer, including port number>.

• On Mac OSX, type the following command in the command line: /applications/google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure=<IP Address of server computer, including port number> --use-data-dir=<path to some directory where Chrome can put browsing data>
• Once the browser opens, navigate to the IP address of the computer running the server in the URL bar. Make sure to include the port number as well. For example: 192.168.0.117:3000

Resources

Currently, this project uses two different libraries to implement WebRTC connections between clients:

1. SimpleWebRTC for the video and audio data
2. Socket.io-p2p for the canvas and text chat data