After deciding that the Red5 Eclipse Plug-in was the source of most of my Red5 related woes, I’ve just spent a whole day trying to deploy a Red5 app without it.
Because the project code generated by the Plug-in doesn’t work when deployed on my PC, I’ve had to adapt the source of a simple example that was written on a Mac.
However if I deploy that app by hand (i.e. copying and pasting the folder containing the META-INF & WEB-INF folders into my Red5 webapps directory and renaming it Red5Tut) it doesn’t work, even after stopping and restarting the Red5 service several times.
But… if I deploy the app automatically from within Eclipse by cleaning the Red5 Server instance I created (as mentioned before I can’t actually run the server from within Eclipse, so cleaning it is as far as I go) then start the Red5 process externally in Services, the app actually works!
Once the app is up and running though, the next problem is trying to update it. Even if I manually stop the Red5 service, delete the app folder from webapps, clean the server in Eclipse (automatically redeploying the app to webapps on the server), it still exhibits same behaviour as if its just cached the last version somewhere. How could this be? Is Eclipse caching the project somehow? I tried rebuilding/resaving it multiple times…
Short of buying a Mac I’m pretty stumped as to how I’m actually supposed to develop using this software. I’m starting to think that FMS is well worth the license fee and that the comparatively toy town server side language is a small price to pay when you consider we managed to get the system up, running and tested in a matter of hours… I’ve had more problems with this software than any other I can recall, which is a shame as all I initially wanted it for was a free version of something I already knew how to use. I know its all in Beta, but I wasn’t prepared for the level of testing I’ve obviously signed up for.
Question 1: Why does it make a difference if I deploy the app using the Eclipse Plug-in instead of doing it manually?
Question 2: Does anyone know how to fix or at least get around this weird caching problem I’m having when trying to update app?
If anyone has any answers or ideas I’d be really grateful. I’m gearing up to work on a multi player game project and at the moment (as much as I’d like to be able to) it looks like I can’t use Red5.
November 27, 2008 at 7:56 pm |
dont give up
Dont blame red5 for all the problems you had , most of them are because you need some more experience working with java+eclipse.
The problem you had when deploying the app with/without eclipse is because when you use eclipse it automatically takes or sets the classpath for the project and compiles the classes correctly using jars and libs available in the project , instead when you tried to just copy the app and run red5 i guess the classes werent compiled properly.
To create a new app just copy one already existing open eclipse choose red5/webapps as workspace and create a new project (not a Java project just a new project) name it like your folder app and eclipse will take the code and will show you what problems your app has (probably build path problems)
Well try that and see if you can fix the problems eclipse shows and then try running red5 using red5.bat
November 27, 2008 at 10:32 pm |
Hi paranoio, thanks for your comment.
You’re right of course, I haven’t had a lot of experience with Java+Eclipse. But then I’d never used Eclipse when I started with FlexBuilder and I picked that up fairly easily, and I’d never looked at multiuser servers before when we setup FMS and the same applies.
I think if a product is to be taken seriously it needs to be fairly easy to use, at least by the reasonably experienced developers the product is targeted at (like myself). We can forgive Red5 at the minute because its in Beta, but I think it needs some serious testing on PC before the version 1.0 release.
I made sure the project was compiled properly and all the classpaths were valid before I tested the app, and there were no errors so I would be surprised if that was the problem. Also the app I was testing did actually work when deployed, the problem was rather to do with not being able to update it after the initial deployment due to some weird caching thing.
I may try your suggestion anyway though about importing the project from the “red5/webapps” workspace just to see if there are any surprises.
cheers
rob
November 29, 2008 at 6:55 am |
I have the same problems… Am i going to give up too ?
My first goal was to developp a webconf using Red5 & flex.
I’ve found another nice opensource project from a french guy to stream video : http://haxevideo.org/
http://blog.haxe.org/entry/28
at about 38mn
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=4962451727046313380&hl=en
But it needs to leanr another langage : haxe
to be continued…
November 30, 2008 at 4:10 pm |
Hi Rob,
I already replied to your email on the Flash Brighton list, but figured that I should write a response here for others having this issue. I think that Paranoio has some good tips there, but more importantly, the Eclipse plugin will only work with version 0.8 and above.
So, since it seems that you are having trouble with the latest installer for Windows I would suggest that you grab the tar ball version and work with it. It’s basically just a zipped up version (obviously not a .zip file, but rather a .tar file) of the binaries. Un-tar that file, and it will produce a Red5 directory with everything in it that you will need to run. Just point the plugin to the .bat files there and you should be good to go.
Of course understanding how to manually deploy your applications will be valuable too, so with that in mind I would suggest also asking on the mailing list on details there. Good luck! And, as always thanks for sharing your experiences.
December 1, 2008 at 1:19 pm |
Thanks for your continued support Chris. I’ll be sure to test that and report my findings.
December 2, 2008 at 6:12 pm |
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