// the find
cjb/serverless-webrtc
A demo of using WebRTC with no signaling server.
A 2013-era tech demo showing that WebRTC peer connections can be established without a dedicated signaling server — you copy-paste the offer/answer SDP blobs manually (over IM, email, whatever). Supports text chat and file transfer between a Node.js CLI client and a browser client. It's a teaching tool, not a production library.
The core point it demonstrates — that WebRTC signaling is just data exchange and doesn't require a server — is genuinely useful for understanding how WebRTC works. The Node/browser interop is a nice touch that shows the protocol is truly cross-platform. File transfer support makes it slightly more than a toy. Works straight from file:// in Firefox, which is a neat trick.
Abandoned since 2021, and the underlying APIs have moved — Chrome 35 / Firefox 29 compatibility notes are a museum exhibit at this point, and the wrtc Node module it depends on has its own bitrot story. The manual copy-paste signaling is the entire 'feature' but also makes it completely unusable for anything real; there's no path from this demo to a working product without replacing the signaling layer entirely. Bootstrap 2 and jQuery 2 in the vendor folder date it badly. No ICE candidate handling explanation, so anyone trying to learn from it will hit a wall when NAT traversal fails.