Nextcloud Rolls Out Audio/Video/Chat Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nextcloud Rolls Out Audio/Video/Chat Support

The Nextcloud cloud hosting software forked from ownCloud now has audio/video/chat abilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nextcloud-Talk

[froyo]

I am a bit curious, why it should be a good idea to add yet another video/voice/im platform. What about integrating e.g. a matrix client instead?

[jospoortvliet]

I am a bit curious, why it should be a good idea to add yet another video/voice/im platform. What about integrating e.g. a matrix client instead?

We're certainly building on other libraries, this isn't written from scratch. And we'd like to offer integration (connection) with XMPP and Matrix. Our protocol will certainly support that.

But we can't integrate Matrix itself because it isn't a PHP app, and thus it would be like with the old Spreed app that was written in Go: users would have to do all kinds of complicated stuff to install it. Nextcloud Talk is installed with ONE click and then just works. No need for packages, command line, changing your web server settings or htaccess file - nothing. Just works ;-)

And as communication (audio/video/text chat) is becoming a core required feature for many of our users, we have put in effort to built and integrate this. It can be used stand-alone, of course, though that mostly makes sense in an enterprise environment.

Besides - how many other webRTC based, open source, self-hosted voice/video/im apps are there? Not exactly dozens - and all the others are way harder to install than Nextcloud Talk, 100% sure.

[macemoneta]

The administrative ease of use for Nextcloud makes it simple, even in a home environment. My wife and I migrated all our external service-based calendar, contacts, files, todo lists, and phone photos/videos painlessly. Now we'll be able to migrate our communications as well. It's an impressive product, and surprisingly light-weight; we started out running it on a single board computer (Linksprite PCDuino Lite). Thanks to the developers for giving us back control of our data; there aren't a lot of products moving in that direction these days.

[GreatEmerald]

Indeed. I tried using the Spreed app, but it had some problems with connectivity; with the new implementation I might as well give it another shot!

[Kendji]

This is very nice, planning to upgrade my nextcloud soon😃

[Cape]

Damn, NextCloud is so nice!

In a very short time they manage to replicate what Google took years to do. I wonder what the tens of thousands of Google devs are doing at all times!

[johanb]

But we can't integrate Matrix itself because it isn't a PHP app, and thus it would be like with the old Spreed app that was written in Go: users would have to do all kinds of complicated stuff to install it. Nextcloud Talk is installed with ONE click and then just works. No need for packages, command line, changing your web server settings or htaccess file - nothing. Just works ;-)

Sounds like it would be a good idea to try and get first class support for non-PHP nextcloud apps then. The PHP language is losing marketshare every year and the ecosystem with it does aswell, so if the success of high-quality nextcloud apps are dependent on the PHP ecosystem it's just a matter of time until you will be required to implement more and more things from scratch.

I have no experience with NextCloud however so I might be completely wrong about this, this is just my first reaction to that paragraph.

[Maudit]

Every year is the year in which "The PHP language is losing marketshare every year". Sometimes It happens in favor of asp, sometimes in favor of Java, sometimes in favor of python, sometimes in favor of Ruby, sometimes in favor of nodejs...
in the meantime, in the real world:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/ove...g_language/all

Yearly trend:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/his..._language/ms/y

[johanb]

Every year is the year in which "The PHP language is losing marketshare every year". Sometimes It happens in favor of asp, sometimes in favor of Java, sometimes in favor of python, sometimes in favor of Ruby, sometimes in favor of nodejs...
in the meantime, in the real world:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/ove...g_language/all

Yearly trend:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/his..._language/ms/y

That source check websites for traces of what backend generated the files, in a world of dynamic webpages this is rare (and sometimes even consider a security flaw it's easier to attack something if you know what it runs on). It is very hard to do these kinds of statistics, but if you look at what kind of backend development positions are available it's certainly not 83% PHP developers they are looking for. If you look at the SO developer survey only 31.5% of back-end developers say they code in PHP.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/s...per-occupation