HackMeUp #7

Andrzej Tucholka Lead Code Architect

Last Friday we have organized another of Tuenti’s development feasts. In the atmosphere of great innovation most of our developers were coding things they find interesting, important and simply awesome.

At the end of the day everybody grabbed some snacks and favorite drinks and we had over one hour discussing and presenting results of our work.

The winner (by popular vote) project – Video Chat was implemented by Davide Mendolia and Sergio Cinos Rubio. Again, congratulations to both!

Davide Mendolia Frontend Engineer

We experimented with one of the new features of Adobe Flash Player 10.0. The feature allows us to do peer-to-peer connection for exchanging audio and video.
The traditional streaming architecture is based on a client sending the content to a server (Flash Media Server) and then other clients connecting to it to receive the stream.

The new possibility introduced in 10.0, is to by-pass this bottleneck, by connecting directly to the client.
How this is implemented? The two clients that wish to communicate with each other, connect first to a rendezvous server (Adobe Stratus), that generates a “Peer Id” for each of them.

This peer id should be exchanged between clients to be able to establish the connection. We decided to use our chat platform based on XMPP to send this information. When the first client decides to establish the communication with the second, we ask through our jabber interface using HMTL and Javascript, if the second client accepts the comunication and at the same time we provide the peer id of the first one. When accepted, the second client connects to the first one trough flash sending its Peer Id, and the two-way communication can start.

Links: Adobe Stratus

Other implemented projects included:

• Photos in common – suggesting people that you might know basing on you being tagged on same photos as other people.
• Where 2 – detecting users geoposition and suggesting places you might like and that are close to your current position.
• Google gadgets for trac – a trac macro allowing integration with any google gadget.
• Real time notifications – a real time notifications informing you about the activity in your friends network.
• Local 2.0 – live visualization of what is going on in Tuenti Places, added some additional and really cool views showing interesting places that one should know about and more.
• Tuenti in HipHop – a one day sprint to compile Tuenti using HipHop.