PROJECT STATUS

[bennyboer]

UPDATE FROM 04-11-2021

BBB PR https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/pull/13609 introduced fetching the BBB version. Unfortunately this is deactivated by default and thus is not really a good idea to use.

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This issue is meant to be a short update on the current project status.

Since I'll be having more time in the future I want to rewrite this "prototype" using null-safe Flutter. Reflecting the past experience of creating this BBB client for mobile devices I found some things quite problematic and will need to find solutions for them first, before rewriting this thing.

Problems with the current implementation

• How to deal with BBB server updates? What to support, what not?
  • As addressed in https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/9212 there is currently no easy way to retrieve the BBB server version
  • Since we use a kind of "inofficial" "unsupported" way of interacting with the BBB server, which is the HTML5 server API (as far as I know some kind of MeteorJS generated stuff), the App breaks and will break a lot following BBB server updates
  • I created an issue to get a publicly available API for each individual BBB servers in the future that will allow us to query the BBB server version (https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/12762)
  • Using the BBB server version we can notify the user about unsupported BBB server instead of providing a poor user experience by crashing or encountering undefined behavior
  • Additionally we'll be able to customize our API calls depending on the BBB server version to support multiple different BBB server versions from a single code base

Blockers for the project

• [x] Being able to retrieve the BBB server version (https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/12762)