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Ask HN: Have you tried out the Tokbox API?

3 points by vrikhter 16y ago

Just wondering how long it took you to get it up and running on your site? Our use case: give a user the ability to video chat directly from the browser.

johns 16y ago
I built a live, weekly web show using it at overloadshow.com. It didn't take me very long to get up and running. The main work for me was making it so that random people couldn't fire up their video. Once permissions are added to the API (I hear it's a priority), a lot of that won't be necessary. I have plans to make it so I can let people start video long enough to ask a question, then kick them out again but I haven't yet implemented it. While there are a few places I think the API could be cleaned up and some features I'd like to see added, overall though I'm very pleased with how easy it was to get started working from the many examples provided.
- vrikhter 16y ago
  Awesome feedback John...also I watched a bit of the show, intriguing :) Don't mean to pry too much, does not very long mean 15-20 hours worth of work? less? More?
  - johns 16y ago
    I'd say 20 hours sounds about right.
- iansmall 16y ago
  Yes, indeedy, permissions in the OpenTok API are coming very soon. Also, in our release 10 days ago we made it easier for sites that want to let people "ask a question, then kick them out ago" using forceUnpublish(). And thanks to a whole bunch of default event handling we've been adding over the last 4-6 weeks, we will soon publish a new "super simple" piece of sample code that gets a basic everyone-sees-everyone implementation of OpenTok down to about 30 lines of sample JavaScript code. This will make for an even simpler starting point for incremental code development.
  - vrikhter 16y ago
    Ian, thanks for the direct response. Any timeline on when you're going to be releasing this next update?
    - iansmall 16y ago
      Fingers crossed, late this week to our developer staging environment, next week to production. But we have a bunch of stuff going on this week with partner site launches that creates some (welcome) distraction for us and makes it necessary to keep those fingers crossed... If you're in the opentok-developer google group, you will see the release update message in real-time.
      - iansmall 16y ago
        And it's there, in v0.91.5, pushed to staging today. For topline information, look here: http://groups.google.com/group/opentok-developers/browse_thread/thread/abea1a5a3a18a1c http://groups.google.com/group/opentok-developers/browse_thr... Happy coding.

3 points by vrikhter 16y ago

Just wondering how long it took you to get it up and running on your site? Our use case: give a user the ability to video chat directly from the browser.

johns 16y ago

I built a live, weekly web show using it at overloadshow.com. It didn't take me very long to get up and running. The main work for me was making it so that random people couldn't fire up their video. Once permissions are added to the API (I hear it's a priority), a lot of that won't be necessary. I have plans to make it so I can let people start video long enough to ask a question, then kick them out again but I haven't yet implemented it. While there are a few places I think the API could be cleaned up and some features I'd like to see added, overall though I'm very pleased with how easy it was to get started working from the many examples provided.

vrikhter 16y ago
Awesome feedback John...also I watched a bit of the show, intriguing :) Don't mean to pry too much, does not very long mean 15-20 hours worth of work? less? More?
- johns 16y ago
  I'd say 20 hours sounds about right.
iansmall 16y ago
Yes, indeedy, permissions in the OpenTok API are coming very soon. Also, in our release 10 days ago we made it easier for sites that want to let people "ask a question, then kick them out ago" using forceUnpublish(). And thanks to a whole bunch of default event handling we've been adding over the last 4-6 weeks, we will soon publish a new "super simple" piece of sample code that gets a basic everyone-sees-everyone implementation of OpenTok down to about 30 lines of sample JavaScript code. This will make for an even simpler starting point for incremental code development.
- vrikhter 16y ago
  Ian, thanks for the direct response. Any timeline on when you're going to be releasing this next update?
  - iansmall 16y ago
    Fingers crossed, late this week to our developer staging environment, next week to production. But we have a bunch of stuff going on this week with partner site launches that creates some (welcome) distraction for us and makes it necessary to keep those fingers crossed... If you're in the opentok-developer google group, you will see the release update message in real-time.
    - iansmall 16y ago
      And it's there, in v0.91.5, pushed to staging today. For topline information, look here: http://groups.google.com/group/opentok-developers/browse_thread/thread/abea1a5a3a18a1c http://groups.google.com/group/opentok-developers/browse_thr... Happy coding.