  Internet telephony and multimedia communication protocols have matured over
the last fifteen years. Recently, the web is evolving as a popular platform for
everything we do on the Internet including email, text chat, voice calls,
discussions, enterprise apps and multi-party collaboration. Unfortunately,
there is a disconnect between web and traditional Internet telephony protocols
as they have ignored the constraints and requirements of each other.
Consequently, the Flash Player is being used as a web browser plugin by many
developers for web-based voice and video calls. We describe the challenges of
video communication using a web browser, present a simple API using a Flash
Player application, show how it supports wide range of web communication
scenarios in the cloud, and describe how it can interoperate with Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based systems. We describe both the advantages and
challenges of Flash Player based communication applications. The presented API
could guide future work on communication-related web protocol extensions.
