Education Collaboration Software Client

Description

This project brings real-time video cross platform between Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS for sharing video in classrooms. Since this client was marketed to an international audience, it supports 10 different languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

This product is designed to make screen sharing as quick and easy as possible without any cables or complicated software. You simply download the client, connect and can start sharing your screen. To keep things organized, this software has a robust moderation toolset that provides teachers the controls they need. Part of this moderation system involve the IT departments that can use the Google Admin Panel to provision and manage Chromebook hardware from a Cloud Based service. A single administrator can rollout a school-wide instance of this software without configuring it for each employee or student.

Bringing a custom video client to Android and Chrome OS presents a lot of interesting challenges when you are not a large developer. Our client had strict security guidelines that required us to accept and verify self-signed encryption certificates over TLS connections. On Chromebooks, Google does not support this with the APIs available to normal developers. This meant processing encrypted data in native Javascript via an open source project: Forge. Since Forge did not support the latest standards, we had to dig in and add TLS 1.2 support ourselves.

All video is captured and transported to the central display in real-time via WebRTC with audio support. Linux recently stopped supporting audio capture for web clients like Chrome, so we wrote custom audio capture code to work directly with Pulseaudio.

Our custom support meant thing didn’t always work as expected, so we test against a wide array of mobile devices spanning the last 4 releases of the Android Operating System. The Linux client is tested against 9 different distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora and RedHat Enterprise Linux. We are constantly monitoring the work Google is doing with Chromium and the Chrome Operating System and making sure we have a handle on the latest quirks and features.

The Android client is developed with Android Studio. Chrome OS is developed in ES6 Javascript using Vue.js, compiled and compressed via Webpack.