Getting into RED5

Hi, Happy new year to all. Hope this brings with it success, friendship, faith and hope to everybody’s life.
To start with lets start with Red5. For past some weeks I was working on Red5, yeah its just some 2 -3 weeks only. All these time I was only trying to get my first application going and running Flash remoting in it. It took me some time but its worth.

First of all to go with Red5 it is mandatory to have Flash and JAVA handy. Belive me, its the same as AS3 development in an IDE such as Eclipse. There are syntax changes but over all its the same kind of stuff. So it is fun developing in JAVA as well as in AS3. RED5 supports JAVA SPRING framework for applications out of the box. Being said that, Spring makes its easy for a beginniner developer to get going in JAVA as all one need to write is a POJO(Plain Old Java Object) and configure one XML file.Cool, so lets get started. Below are the source files, I hope it helps somebody out there.

Source Files One

Source Files Two
I am currenntly working on Red5 v0.7.0 Final as the 0.8RC1 gave me some problem in the beginning.I will try that once I am more comfortable in RED5.So my point here is as a beginner you must try a stable version of the RED5. I am on the standalone version of it.Though it is possible to run RED5 inside of TOMCAT server as well.The installation is simple and hassle free.I have installed it in (C:\Red5) folder of my Windows Vista Machine. Once installed one can go inside the root folder of RED5(C:\Red5) and start the server by running “red5.bat” file.Once the server is up and running, just point your browser to “http://localhost:5080/” and you will see the default home page of RED5 s\erver.Fine, so everything is up now.We will write a simple application, I mean java application and test it.
I am not going in detail about how to wite a JAVA class, as there are a lot of tutorials available for it.Just remember that you have to write a simple java class. In order to get the communicate with the Flash client all the JAVA classes which needed to be accessed must extend “org.red5.server.adapter.ApplicationAdapter” class.I will be writing two classes, one in a default package and two inside a package, just to know whether we can access all the classes from inside a package. The classes look as below

class : RedTest

import org.red5.server.adapter.ApplicationAdapter;

public class RedTest extends ApplicationAdapter {
public String greet(String msg){
return msg;
}
public int add(int a,int b){
return a+b;
}
public int subtract(int a,int b){
return a-b;
}

}

class : RedGreet

package com.services;
import java.util.Arrays;
import org.red5.server.adapter.ApplicationAdapter;
import com.services.Greetings;
public class RedGreet extends ApplicationAdapter {
public int add(int a,int b,int c){
return a+b+c;
}
public String sayMe(String message){
return message;
}
public Greetings greetUser(){
Greetings greet=new Greetings();
greet.userName=”saumya”;
greet.userMsg=”Red5 giving back Greetings Object.”;
return greet;
}
}

Thats all from java side. I am serious.Compile these classes and they will produce the class files out of the java files. Now all that remains is the configuration.
All the applications on RED5 remains on “webapps” folder (C:\Red5\webapps).For a quick start I will suggest just copy all the contents from the “echo” folder (C:\Red5\webapps\echo) and paste them in a new folder named “redVO”(C:\Red5\webapps\redVO).Well the the name is not important as long as you remember it to configure it in the coming XML file. So lets take the name as “redVO”. Now lets copy all the class files inside “C:\Red5\webapps\redVO\WEB-INF\classes” folder.Just make sure the packages are same as the deveopment.So the classes will be paced as “C:\Red5\webapps\redVO\WEB-INF\classes\RedTest.class” and “C:\Red5\webapps\redVO\WEB-INF\classes\com\services\RedGreet.class”.

Now all that remains is configure some xml and properties files.Come back to the folder “C:\Red5\webapps\redVO\WEB-INF”.we need to configure “red5-web.properties”,”red5-web.xml” and “web.xml” files.
I found this is the most critical task of the RED5 development as I struggle a bit with this :). Its not tough but must know where to do what.
So the first thing to do is, configure the “red5-web.properties” file.the contents of the file looks as below

webapp.contextPath=/echo
webapp.virtualHosts=*,localhost, 127.0.0.1

The thing to change here is the real name of the folder “C:\Red5\webapps\redVO”, it can be something else  but for a beginner it is best to get the name same as the folder. So our properties file will look as below

webapp.contextPath=/redVO
webapp.virtualHosts=*,localhost, 127.0.0.1

Now lets open the “web.xml” file, in this file the only thing needed to change is the thing we did in the last file.We need to add the same folder name here as well. Find an XMl node as below

<context-param>
<param-name>webAppRootKey</param-name>
<param-value>/echo</param-value>
</context-param>

and change it to “redVO” from “echo”

<context-param>
<param-name>webAppRootKey</param-name>
<param-value>/redVO</param-value>
</context-param>

Now the most important and essential setting of all, the whole expanation may take a new blogpost. I will just explain in brief. Just look at a line as below

<bean id=”web.handler” class=”org.red5.server.webapp.echo.Application” />

change it to

<bean id=”web.handler” class=”RedTest” />

If you remember we had created this “RedTest” class in the default package. In the same way add below lines

<bean id=”Test.service” class=”RedTest” />
<bean id=”Greet.service” class=”com.services.RedGreet” />

So these are refferring to the Classes we have created in JAVA.The important thing here is the “id”.Whatever we put in the “id” field will be refferred to from our Flash client. Another thing is the “service” must be a postfix to the “id” as “Test.service”.Now if we need to call a method of “RedTest” class from Flash we need to call it as “Test.myMethod();” or “Test.greet();”

Thats all :).In flash end I have this code below in

Well.The cool thing is if you look at the flash code, we are conneting to

nc.connect(“http://localhost:5080/redVO/gateway&#8221;);

This is remoting call.But if we want to call the rtmp too we can call it and this will be as

nc.connect(“rtmp://localhost:1935/redVO”);

Now just start the red5 server and test movie in Flash IDE, you will see the results. Thats it, hope you are enjoying. Happy flashing :)