Creating a Red5 User Development Environment

Background

Red5 is a hard product to describe because while its main target market is fairly well defined, its capabilities are numerous because of the powerful open source technologies its built on. It's probably most accurate to describe it as packaged server stack whose main goal is to provide remote services for Flash and Flex clients. The main services implement the server-side of the Flash remoting and streaming APIs, but through these nearly any type of service can be exposed to the client.

Notes

This article is intended to get you setup with an environment in which you can develop applications - both server and client side - for the Red5 application server. It is NOT meant to set you up to make modifications to the Red5 server code itself, although there are only a few additional steps you need in order to do that.

It is assumed that you will want to write server applications in Java and client applications in Flex using the Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse.. There are other options; you could write server code in a number of scripting languages that run in the JVM, and you could write client applications in Flash using AS2 or AS3 or the open source Flex SDK. These other options are not covered by this guide.

Prerequisites

1. You should have Java 5 installed and configured as your default JVM.
2. You should have Java 6 available to you (requires 64-bit Mac OS X 10.5 or higher, Windows etc.)
   

Installation & Configuration

1. Install Eclipse 3.4.2 JEE edition. We'll be using Eclipse + the Flex Builder plugin rather than the standalone Flex Builder since it comes with more of the plugins we need by default. If you already have the standalone Flex Builder, it doesn't hurt to install Eclipse somewhere else.
2. Install Subclipse 1.6. Subclipse will let us check out code from source code repositories on the 'net.
3. Install the Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse.
4. Install the Red5 Server.
5. Install the Red5 plugin for Eclipse.
6. Set your default JVM to Java 6 (Mac OS X instructions).
7. Configure the Red5 plugin.