Main article: Data Channels

Exchanging Messages and Data

Rainway provides Peers with the ability to create Data Channels, over which they can exchange arbitrary application-level binary data.

Sending messages over this channel is permitted any time two peers are connected end-to-end, whether they're streaming or not.

Initialization

The peer that requested the peer-to-peer connection is responsible for creating Data Channels. Here's how to create a Data Channel:

// given some peer object (see the previous tutorial page for an example)

// create a data channel
const channel = await peer.createDataChannel({
  id: 'MyChannelLabel',          // unique name for the channel
  mode: DataChannelMode.Reliable,   // see Data Channels main article
});

If you instead need to be notified when a remote peer creates a Data Channel, you can use the datachannel event on a Peer object. For example:

// given some peer object (see the previous tutorial page for an example)

// add a listener for when the remote peer creates a data channel
peer.addEventListener("datachannel", (channel) => {
	// the channel may now be stored and used
});

Sending and receiving messages

To send a message to a peer, use the send method on the DataChannel:

// building on the above sample
// send a message over a data channel
channel.send("hello world");

The message will be received by the message handler on the other Peer. For example, if that Peer is also using the Web SDK:

// given some data channel object

// add a listener for when new messages arrive
channel.addEventListener("message", (data) => console.log(data));