Nextcloud App for BigBlueButton integration

ramezrafla · April 22, 2020, 7:48am

Functionally it’s ready.

It’s missing one thing, adding to the UI inputs to get the server and secret. I don’t know how (I am not a PHP developer so will have to go through a longer learning curve), if someone in the community can help would be appreciated.

JimmyKater · April 22, 2020, 8:00am

@ramezrafla

ummm… have you asked founder- @frank for help on that very point? i remember he offered some help and assistance to you and your project.

ramezrafla · April 22, 2020, 8:16am

@JimmyKater, ok, I’ll try again

@frank, concerning the BigBlueButton app, I am taking up your offer to help. We need help to get it ready for the app store.

Specifically, what is missing to go for production is adding the 2 needed fields (BBB server and secret) to the admin UI.

Is that something your team can help us with? We are not originally PHP developers and the curve may be steep to set this up when you guys will do it with your eyes closed.

We can then take it from there.

Thanks so much

JimmyKater · April 22, 2020, 8:50am

@nickvergessen maybe could chime in here as well as he seems to be the maintainer of this project.

frank · April 22, 2020, 11:58am

Very nice. I will look for someone who can help you

prewest · April 23, 2020, 9:48am

Installed the BBB server and the Github installation, looking forward for further updates for this project.
If someone wants thats busy with the dev. need a working BBB server to test, I have one and can share the URL + secret.

2und4zig · April 24, 2020, 6:28am

@ramezrafla
Whow. I am astonished. Works great at least on my Testserver. Looking for production.
For your Readme.md:
this doesn´t work:
git clone git@github.com:ramezrafla/spreed-bigbluebutton.git spreed --branch stable18-bbb --depth 1
This does:
git clone https://github.com/ramezrafla/spreed-bigbluebutton.git spreed --branch stable18-bbb --depth 1

ramezrafla · April 24, 2020, 3:40pm

Thanks – fixing the git clone command now

It’s production-grade, we use it already.
Waiting for @frank’s help to push in apps store

frank · April 26, 2020, 6:59am

Hi. Thanks a lot for your work. As I mentioned before BigBlueButton integration would be great. The thing is that this should be a completely independent app from Nextcloud Talk in my opinion. The way you forked Talk and patched it in is not really maintainable in the long run. I assumed that to write a completely new app without this huge code duplication. What do you think?

fundecassa · April 26, 2020, 8:21am

The app works great on my Firefox and Chrome Linux Desktop client. The Nextcloud Talk Android-App does not work. Maybe the bigluebutton implementation in Moodle, which works great with android and Desktop-Browser, could be adapted easily. I am sure this app would be very welcomed by the NC-community.

Krischan · April 26, 2020, 1:58pm

Looks like the JSXC author is cooking something

Krischan · April 26, 2020, 2:10pm

Slightly OT, but this sounds like a super cool addition to larger BBB deployments:

ramezrafla · April 27, 2020, 12:06am

Thanks @frank

The Talk app is actually very nice, it has conversations with permanent links, permanent chat history, password-protected etc. A perfect replacement for Zoom – except for three things

The UI of the Webrtc client is very immature and clumsy (try with 10 attendees!)
That dumb & costly signalling server with its esoteric protocol – even the nodejs implementation is not scalable
Scalability of the signalling server

Everything it lacks, BigBlueButton does and does it very well. The client UI is very nicely done. It has recording of sessions etc.

Maintaining this fork of Talk is actually very easy. When a new version is released we pull in and review the differences. A matter of 30 minutes. Then we test and push to production. We will continue this effort as it is commercially expedient for us.

I don’t see another way to have a mature well-functioning conversation app with a mature infrastructure.

This app does the community a great service. I would treat it as such if I were you.

ramezrafla · April 27, 2020, 12:11am

This is the de-facto way to scale BBB servers.

The one major drawback is that there is no inter-server communication. The entire conversation has to be with the same BBB server. The load balancer remembers which conversation is attached to which server and redirects you to it.

This means:

you will always need to have excess capacity to support large conversations.
there is an upper limit on the number of attendees in a single conversation (the capacity of a single BBB server)

However, you will get much better quality of service and you are saving thousands of $ in service fees vs proprietary solutions

ramezrafla · April 27, 2020, 12:16am

@fundecassa
I haven’t looked at mobile yet - my guess is moodle is using Cordova to have webrtc within the webview.
It’s on our todo to have a Cordova app for our nextcloud instance. Will share when it’s ready. Real soon.

kesselb · April 27, 2020, 7:05am

https://github.com/sualko/cloud_bbb/blob/master/lib/Settings/Admin.php

https://github.com/sualko/cloud_bbb/blob/a888627e1436bd035e2cc35703a66810cfada800/lib/Controller/JoinController.php#L114-L117

kesselb · April 27, 2020, 7:15am

I suggest to rename your app to avoid confusion with Talk.

github.com

ramezrafla/spreed-bigbluebutton/blob/stable18-bbb/templates/settings/personal/clients.php

<?php
/**
 * @copyright Copyright (c) 2018 Julius Härtl <jus@bitgrid.net>
 *
 * @author Julius Härtl <jus@bitgrid.net>
 *
 * @license GNU AGPL version 3 or any later version
 *
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
 * published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
 * License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

This file has been truncated. show original

If the talk apps does not work yet you might comment the view.

JimmyKater · April 27, 2020, 7:57am

well … as it seems there is a kind of urgency connected to this matter.
so to get it done as fast as possible it would be helpful if this app would be on the appstore. just as “quick and dirty” (no offense meant @ramezrafla) as it is now… if the only thing that is missing is the release to appstore.

let’s call this a “first step”

in following steps it could be written anew, if neccessary… but this will take time, that we don’t really have on that subject. videoconferencing is needed now. the original talk for community isn’t really usable for more than 3-4 ppl.

so i’m suggesting to get the finished app out to the world asap. - and then think about polishing it.

sualko · April 27, 2020, 8:51am

You are never unobserved

It’s a bit sad that we have now two applications for the same purpose, but I was not aware of that talk fork. Maybe we can cooperate, see https://github.com/ramezrafla/spreed-bigbluebutton/issues/10

I’m currently preparing the first release and I think it will be published in the next hour. Would be great if we could have only one bbb app for Nextcloud.

frank · April 27, 2020, 9:06am

Very cool. Again! It is awesome to have BBB or maybe Jitsi integration in Nextcloud. This can be alternatives to Nextcloud Talk. No problem here. But this need to be separate apps with separate names and IDs. Just forking Talk and patching BBB support in is not cool and not supportable. So as long as this are separate apps that don’t collide then all is awesome. As a check. It should be possible to install Nextcloud Talk and this other BBB/Jitis integration apps in parallel without PHP/JS Code conflicts or UI and Usability issues. Thanks everyone