By default or so I’ve been told, the Flash Player will try various ports when attempting to connect to a resource. In Red5, RTMP is supported out-of-the-box on the default RTMP port of 1935 and HTTP is setup on 5080. A “special” server is started on 8088 as well to handle RTMPT only requests, but this requires that you set your request url as “rtmpt://myserver:8088/myapp/” which can be confusing and completely ignores the Flash Player port probing. So I offer this solution, allowing you to setup HTTP on port 80 and RTMPT on port 80 as well. Since Red5 includes a servlet container (Tomcat by default), you have a full-fledged HTTP server and servlet engine built-in; allowing a servlet to answer the RTMPT requests.
The first file we need to modify is the server properties file located in the conf directory:
red5/conf/red5.properties

• Locate the http.port key and change it to 80 instead of 5080
• Do not change the rtmpt.port entry, it should be 8088
• Save and close the file

The last file to modify will be your web application configuration or “web.xml” file. The web application configuration file will be located here: red5/webapps/myapp/WEB-INF/web.xml if your application name is “myapp”. Add these entries:

   	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>org.red5.server.net.rtmpt.RTMPTServlet</servlet-class>
		<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
	</servlet>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/fcs/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/open/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/close/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/send/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>rtmpt</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/idle/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

Informational links about FlashPlayer and ports:
HTTP Tunneling protocols

The Trouble with Proxy Servers

I recall seeing a question from a user about accessing servlet parameters from their Red5 application, so I have created a small demo which shows how to not only access sevlet parameters from Red5 apps but the other way around as well.

Retrieve a servlet context parameter from inside a Red5 application (AppContext -> Servlet)

1. Grab a reference to the application context

ApplicationContext appCtx = getContext().getApplicationContext();

2. Get the servlet context

ServletContext ctx = ((XmlWebApplicationContext) appCtx).getServletContext();

3. Get the context parameter

String param = ctx.getInitParameter("myparam");

Retrieve an application context parameter from a inside a servlet (Servlet -> AppContext)

1. Get the servlet context

ServletContext ctx = getServletContext();

2. Grab a reference to the application context

ApplicationContext appCtx = ctx.getAttribute(WebApplicationContext.ROOT_WEB_APPLICATION_CONTEXT_ATTRIBUTE);

3. Get the bean holding the parameter

MyBean bean = appCtx.getBean("mybean");
String param = bean.getParameter("myparam");

Sample project files: parameterdemo.zip

Instructions:

Unzip the demo and create a new directory named parameterdemo in your red5/webapps directory, then restart your server.

Open your browser and go here: http://localhost/parameterdemo/myservlet?paramName=myparam

You should see “Hello World”

To test the Red5 application you will need to create a Flex or Flash application that connects to: rtmp://localhost/parameterdemo

Then simply call “getParameter” passing a parameter name you want the value of. The name must match a context param in the web.xml file.

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)