Programming WebRTC

Building a Message Queue

Joining a call and sending messages works great. But there’s a problem that you might have already discovered: the way you’ve written the chat feature, it’s possible for users to compose and attempt to send messages outside of a connected state. Go ahead and reload one of your browser windows and, before joining the call, compose and send a message. You’ll see the message appended in the chat box as though everything’s hunky-dory, but the input box will not be cleared and your console will report an error like Uncaught TypeError: can’t access property "send", $peer.chatChannel is undefined.

We need to decide what to do when users compose and send messages outside of a connected call state. While we could do something ...