[Red5] red5 vs other servers.

[Walter Tak]

We have those pieces of information on Red5. It has been written, it has 
been done before.

We, as a community, faced some problems with a very simple little but 
annoying thing ; hosting of the information we had
recently moved to new servers, which went down a bit and now things are back 
on track (literary) on http://trac.red5.org

Everyone can find a ton of information there.

Is it technical ? Yes it is. Is it hard if you don't know Java ? Yes it is. 
Can we soften the pain how to get used to developing with Eclipse and Java 
and concepts like Spring ? That would be pretty hard since the goal of Red5 
is not to teach you Java, how to run a server for your clients or to explain 
how client-side actionscript works.

People who never worked with Java before will have a hard time. Not because 
Red5 is so hard but because they have to adjust to the java-concept. Which 
is different from working with C/C++, PHP, ActionScript or even the 
server-sided AS-code of FMS.

I can trust you all though that your first steps with Flash Media Server 2 
(a few years ago) (closed-source, commercial, server-sided AS) were hard as 
well. Many of the problems the seasoned developers of Red5 read on this list 
aren't related to Red5 but to the concept of client-server communication, 
understanding the way how RTMP/streaming works, getting used to making 
connections with NetConnection in ActionScript or trying to perform 
not-out-of-the-box solutions like trying to transcode audio/video, making 
snapshots, implementing security, setting up a distributed server-farm 
etcetera.

Try to do all those tricks with any other piece of software around and 
you'll learn that they all take quite a lot of time to get used to.

It took me, back in the days, for example, about 3 weeks, just to make a 
single class-101 easy SELECT query from the ApplicationAdapter (v 0.6.1) to 
Mysql.

After I finally understood the architecture those few lines of code took 10 
minutes on the next project. You easily lose the overview when first
starting with Red5. It's not that easy if you want not so easy solutions.

Another thing is that people don't seem to take enough time to perform a 
little search with google on the contents of this (mailing)list. There is a 
ton of information here. Because the information is here already and 
sometimes has been repeated like a dozen (!) times people that finally know 
how to solve their problems don't really care to go through the process of 
writing docs. We don't (really) like to write docs. Not for work nor for 
private matters. At least, most developers don't like that. They're already 
planning the next bug-fix, next feature, next release or even next project 
(some of the people that started Red5 aren't contributing anymore and they 
don't have to). They made a solid foundation and others are now building the 
6 story building on top of it. We are nearing the top floor, imho ; we're 
reaching version 1.0.

Meanwhile the the bottom floors can be used for living and working, perhaps 
with some caution since the building is under construction. The ongoing work 
may result in changes like a new staircase, new electricity-plan or a new 
frontdoor and requires you to adapt your way of thinking or your own 
application(code) (think of the logging-issues). However it's steadily 
getting bigger, taller and more stable.

This is no rant against "non-believers" or anti-open-source-advocates, it's 
just a fact, this is the state of Red5, this is the modus operandi, if you 
spend a bit of time you'll see how things fit together and you'll have a 
decent piece of software to do extraordinary things with for the famous 
open-source price ; only your own (spare) time.

W.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zayzon, Gergely" <gergoe at nexver.hu>
To: <red5 at osflash.org>
Sent: Tuesday, 08 September 2009 21:55
Subject: Re: [Red5] red5 vs other servers.


>I suppose making a documentation/reference manual out of the nothing would 
>be a huge job, but how about making it in small steps? Make an interface 
>where the project leaders can add the public classes/methods/properties 
>(would be better to add it all, and note which is meant for public use, 
>which not), and then volunteers slowly start adding text to the listed 
>"objects"? This is similar to the wiki approach if i'm not mistaken, but it 
>would make it possible to have more people spend limited amount of time and 
>still achieve good results? Me brainstorming.
>
>
> Regards,
> Gergely Zayzon
>
>
> Nicolay Vizovitin wrote:
>> I am kind of a newbie to Red5 application development, as well as
>> using media servers. Thus I found it rather difficult to actually do
>> something by myself in the first place.
>>
>> Installation of Red5 ran smoothly, however I had to tweak a few
>> things. But finding out what should you do to create your own
>> application was rather (well, not so difficult as) time-spending. I've
>> never encountered Spring usage before, so I had a really hard time
>> figuring out how Red5 works. Then I was in a complete confusion
>> because I didn't really know what methods of ApplicationAdapter I
>> should implement (override) and how. And only when I found article in
>> JIRA about migration (sic!) from FMS with a number of usefull
>> examples, I finally reached the enlightment :)
>>
>> Oh, I completely understand the lack of time and currently low
>> priority for making tutorials and such articles. Developers have
>> already done a really awesome job! But my point is that at least there
>> should be one (!) centralized and easy way to find all available
>> applicable docs. (And also I agree that most of the "third-party"
>> tutorials are considerably outdated, thus hugely useless.)
>>
>> --Best regards,
>>   Nicolay
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Red5 mailing list
>> Red5 at osflash.org
>> http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org
>
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