Re: Virtual Meetings

I received an off-line comment that this sort of thing is called "multicasting", and a question, if that's what I'm using?

Frankly, I was NOT up to speed on the term "multicasting", so I googled to see how people were using it. And I must agree that multicasting might be a better term to describe this architecture than "broadcasting", because each message  is simultaneously routed to a specific group of users, as opposed to everyone.

On the other hand, any browser that knows the "Meeting ID" may tune in, so to speak. In my proof-of-concept application the browser is redirected to a unique URL when the "Continue..." button is clicked. A unique Meeting ID is embedded in that.

I pasted that URL into an instance of Opera, and an instance of Internet Explorer, in addition to my original Chrome instance, so that I could see the messages appearing simultaneously in 12 inline frames in 3 browsers. The screen is obviously cluttered at that point. I don't recommend that everyone try that because each "listener" uses a persistent connection to my HTTP server, which currently is configured for only 80 threads. Of course, I could dial that up to thousands of threads, and restart the server.

A different topology might consist of small groups of listeners which receive messages and forward them to additional listeners until every subscriber receives a copy of the message. I'm not doing that. But it sounds interesting.

-Nathan