I just spent many hours trying to get the Admin (demo) application working properly; it was quite painful. Trying to get JNDI and Spring to cooperate in an Embedded Tomcat instance is not what I call fun, but I have it working alright for now. There still seem to be some underlying classloader issues in the server, because I cannot self-contain the web applications. No matter how I configure the server or application, there are always jars that must be in the shared lib directory; if anyone has any experience with this I would love to hear it.  So without further rambling, here are the steps to take to get it working:

1. Obtain the admin war or use my archive

2. Unzip the archive into the webapps directory (red5/webapps/admin)

3. Move the following jars to your shared lib directory (red5/lib)

• derby-10.4.2.0.jar
• jasper-el-6.0.18.jar
• el-api.jar
• simple-jndi-0.11.4.1.jar
• spring-jdbc-2.5.5.jar
• spring-orm-2.5.5.jar
• spring-tx-2.5.5.jar

4. Restart Red5

5. Go to http://localhost:5080/admin/register.html to add new users

I hope this helps those of you new to red5, since I know it can be difficult to get things going at times.

Here is my test version zipped for your convenience: admin_10012008.zip (1.02Mb)

I created a post about this subject almost a year ago, but there were a couple minor issues with the examples. Here I will show what eight additional months of experience can provide. The example provided here uses a custom object in Flex to pass information to and from the server, which in this case will be Red5. If one of you has an example which uses FMS on the server-side, I would be glad to include it here.
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Some of you may know that there are at least two different versions of the IvyDE, the plugin which interfaces Eclipse with your Ivy files. To use the plugin with Red5 you will need the latest version, especially if you use Ganymede. I will record some screen casts to help you through the upgrade / fixes. I apologize now for my large screen size, I will record smaller versions in the future. So without further rambling here is the first video: IvyDE part 1

I recently needed to convert some C / C++ code to Java and I remembered a couple utilities which are supposed to do the conversion for you. These tools under the name C2J aren't especially useful in my case but they are difficult to find so I am making them available here. There are two versions:

• c2java - This is the first-cut I believe
• c2jGNU - This appears to be more robust

I tried to contact the authors before posting this, but they have yet to respond. I take no responsiblity for these tools so use them at your own risk.

I've seen a few posts on the Red5 list where users encountered the "bind" exception when starting Red5; I just had it happen on my PC. Usually its a service running on your machine taking up port 80 (HTTP), port 443 (HTTPS), or 1935 (RTMP). This normally means that IIS, Apache, FMS, or Red5 are running and already bound to these ports; 99% of the time I don't see this issue because of the tight lock I keep on my running services. Today I got the exception and I traced it to Pidgin (an IM client like Trillian that does "them" all), the odd thing is that it was using port 1935 (RTMP). If you get the bind issue, check your running processes and kill-off or reconfigure them as needed. Using the following commands will show your bound ports:
in windows
netstat -an
in linux
netstat -pan
The linux command will give additional details such as the application/service name. For windows you can use TcpView or some similar application to determine the application holding the port.

The first step to perform when using JMX in Red5 is to get the MBeanServer. Once you have a server instance you may look up, create, register, and unregister mbeans. MBeans provide access to methods on classes which implement the associated MBean interface, most of the details about this are beyond the scope of this post. Today, we will cover the loading and unloading of a Red5 context.

 
    MBeanServer mbs = JMXFactory.getMBeanServer();
    ObjectName oName = JMXFactory.createObjectName("type", "ContextLoader");
    ContextLoaderMBean contextLoader = null;
    if (mbs.isRegistered(oName)) {
        contextLoader = (ContextLoaderMBean) MBeanServerInvocationHandler.newProxyInstance
(mbs, oName, ContextLoaderMBean.class, true);
        System.out.println("Context loader was found");
    } else {
        System.err.println("Context loader was not found");
    }
 

Once you have the context loader you can load the context. The context in this case is a Red5 default context consisting of a group of web applications that have been Red5 enabled. To be Red5 enabled means that they have the proper configurations and a class extending org.red5.server.adapter.ApplicationAdapter.

 
    if (contextLoader != null) {
	contextLoader.loadContext("localhost", "c:/red5/webapps/red5-default.xml");
    }
 

To unload the context perform this step.

 
    if (contextLoader != null) {
	contextLoader.unloadContext("localhost");
    }
 

See how simple that is?

Please note that I do not condone the use of System.out as a substitute for proper logging