RongCloud CTO Yang Pan: Geek Online 2020 Programming Challenge allows developers to take the center stage

[51CTO.com original article] Recently, the first Geek Online 2020 Programming Challenge was officially launched. As the organizer of the challenge, RongCloud hopes to take this opportunity to work with developers to jointly explore innovative application scenarios of RTC and IM technologies and discover more practical implementations in the field of communication cloud. It is understood that this programming challenge adopts an online form. Developers use RongCloud IM+RTC SDK to develop innovative applications. Entries are submitted through GitHub. Adhering to the principles of open source, fairness and justice, the works are selected from three aspects: completeness, innovation and commercial value, paying tribute to the spirit of developers.

The epidemic has promoted the development of application scenarios of audio and video technology

In the past, the two most widely used scenarios for audio and video technology were entertainment video live streaming and video conferencing. Driven by this year's epidemic, more audio and video application scenarios have emerged, especially in the two fields of online education and remote office.

With the help of audio and video technology, the user experience has shifted from offline to online, saving time on travel and reducing offline space costs. At the same time, related technologies can be used to obtain a better interactive experience online, bringing about the popularization of remote experience and turning online communication from passive to active.

In the post-epidemic era, remote online communication methods have gradually been recognized by everyone. In addition to online education and remote work, other offline scenarios are also gradually moving online. For example, users can open bank cards remotely, courts can conduct trials online, etc. Through various remote contactless services, everyone enjoys the convenience brought by audio and video technology.

Therefore, the epidemic not only promoted the development of application scenarios of audio and video technology, but correspondingly, audio and video technology has gradually become the basic capability required for various industries and products to support business models.

Geek Online Programming Challenge is launched to explore more business scenarios

In order to explore more and better product application scenarios, RongCloud launched the Geek Online 2020 Programming Challenge with the theme of "Innovation and Practice of Communication Cloud Technology in the Post-epidemic Era" to encourage developers to explore more application scenarios of instant messaging and audio and video technologies. The challenge started registration on August 24 and the competition will last for nearly two months. The online finals will be held on October 17, and the awards will be presented on October 31 at the WICC 2020 Internet Communication Cloud Conference.

When talking about the original intention of holding the programming challenge, RongCloud CTO Yang Pan told the author that RongCloud serves the developer community and RongCloud's mission is to grow together with developers. In the past, RongCloud has established multiple communication channels with developers, including online work orders, phone calls, technical groups, documents, as well as offline technical salons and WICC summits. The programming challenge is intended to allow developers to communicate and interact better, allowing developers to stand in the center of the stage and express their innovative ideas and thoughts. It is also an iteration of RongCloud's interaction model with developers.

It is understood that the entries for this challenge must integrate the latest version of the instant messaging SDK or real-time audio and video (live broadcast) SDK of RongCloud's official website. The application can realize a specific scenario or solve a specific problem, and submit the entire source code of the work, the compiled real machine installation package, and the necessary instruction document (README.md). The source code part is open to the public under the MIT open source agreement.

The works of this challenge will be evaluated and scored by experts based on three dimensions: degree of completion (60%), potential commercial value (20%), and creativity (20%). In Yang Pan's view, excellent works should be more creative and have more ideas. On the premise that the work has a certain degree of completeness, whether it has creative scenes and is also commercially valuable is a plus for the entire work. "I don't think you need to pursue the amount of code in the project, it's not about the scale, but what the developers do should be creative and have ideas that can touch people's hearts, so it is easier to get more extra points from the judges."

Pay tribute to the developer spirit and provide professional services to developers

It is worth noting that the Geek Online 2020 Programming Challenge is different from other developer competitions in two aspects, namely the submission channel and the competition service model.

First of all, entries are not submitted on RongCloud's official website, but on GitHub. Yang Pan explained that as we all know, GitHub is the world's largest open source community, and submitting entries to GitHub is a tribute to the developer spirit. All entries are required to be open source so that they can be tested by all developers, making the entire competition more fair and just.

In addition, many developer competitions in the past were self-service, that is, after the competition organizing committee announced the competition content such as the competition topic, time, schedule, work requirements, and awards, developers could study the use of tools on their own according to the official documents, and submit their works online after completion. RongCloud's approach is completely different. RongCloud will provide dedicated support to all development teams. Yang Pan said that on the one hand, the service team and the R&D team can provide one-on-one support services to the participating teams so that they can complete better works within a limited time; on the other hand, they also want to take this opportunity to allow the R&D team to communicate more deeply with developers, listen to and collect developers' ideas and feedback, so as to help RongCloud's product iteration and evolution.

In terms of challenge rewards, in addition to bonuses and trophies, RongCloud will also introduce investment institutions. If the development team's work is recognized in terms of completeness and commercial value, RongCloud will serve as a bridge to connect it with investment institutions. In addition, if the team members are willing to join RongCloud as individuals, RongCloud's recruitment green channel will also be opened. The winners will also be invited to attend the award ceremony at the 2nd WICC Global Internet Communication Cloud Conference and learn and communicate face-to-face with many experts invited to the conference.

Empower developers to win trust with hard power

In the field of instant messaging and audio and video, there are many competitive companies, from large cloud computing service providers to small start-ups. In the communication cloud track, there are "a hundred schools of thought". What core competitiveness does RongCloud have that can stand out in the industry and win the trust of many developers?

According to Yang Pan, instant messaging technology is relatively closed and private, and the only open source communication protocol in the industry is XMPP. Since the protocol was open sourced in 1999, the complexity of the network in the future mobile Internet era was not foreseen at the beginning of the protocol design. Therefore, there are many problems with the use of this open source protocol today, such as communication quality, system support limit, etc. RongCloud's core R&D team comes from Fetion, which has rich experience in communication technology. It independently designed the communication protocol to ensure the basic quality of platform communication. Today, RongCloud has more than 70 million daily active users, second only to giant products such as WeChat and QQ in China, which shows its technical strength.

In the field of audio and video, Google acquired the VoIP software developer Global IP Solutions in 2010 and obtained WebRTC technology, and open-sourced the project in 2011. However, Google only open-sourced some functions, namely end-to-end communication, which supports the transmission of audio and video streams between two people, but cannot support multi-person communication scenarios. In addition, in more complex network environments, packet loss and insufficient bandwidth are often encountered. Therefore, service providers need to perform optimization in compliance with public open source protocols. Therefore, RongCloud has developed and optimized the user scale, network quality, communication links and interfaces of audio and video to ensure the quality of audio and video and the ease of use of technology.

Although the industry has standard protocols and open source frameworks, there are still barriers to self-development in the fields of audio, video and instant messaging. Yang Pan said that the first is the cost issue, including the formation and investment of team members, which requires a large amount of manpower to complete; the second is the investment of time. In today's era of fierce competition in the Internet, time waits for no one, and stable and available products or functions need to be developed quickly; third, the scale issue. When the number of users surges or the business expands, system instability may lead to unavailable functions, thereby losing users. Based on years of accumulation, RongCloud meets the needs of most customers on the market, encapsulates the functions and capabilities required by developers into interfaces, and even provides a standardized UI interface to help developers quickly complete their product function research and development.

Communication cloud technology has been developing for many years. What are the development trends in the future? Yang Pan said that the development process of communication cloud is relatively gradual. With the advent of 5G, the quality of Internet communication infrastructure has gradually improved, and more changes are the innovative application of scenarios, the richness of functions, and the ease of use of product interfaces. In the future, RongCloud will also focus on relying on the platform to comprehensively improve its capabilities in scenario applications, product functions, infrastructure and interfaces, and empower developers.

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