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1. Leave the Red5 functionality as a separate WAR and use a shared directory which the video plugin would deposit the encoded movies
2. Copy the war artifacts into the Grails plugin so the Grails app embeds the Red5 functionality within the WAR

I opted for the latter because I would like to have the Red5 application code use GORM to read meta data about the Movie asset. Additionally, to have a tight integration with Spring Security I would like to have the artifacts share the same application context. Finally, it is easier to debug code (btw, IntelliJ IDE rocks) if you don’t have to manage the startup of two different WARs. I’d like to say developing this plugin was easy, but in all honesty, it was a totally pain in the bum, and at the time, it seemed overly complex. In hindsight though, I realize that the reason for the “pain in the bum” was my lack of understanding of the life cycle of the context loader in Spring.

Once that hurdle was jumped, due to the tight Java/J2EE integration, the rest of the plugin development, installation scripts, custom artifact, etc. was ridiculously easy. The work was mostly setting up Spring configuration for the plugin. Because of how elegant the plugin architecture is, I think stitching together tiny pieces of functionality that is packaged in plugins is the best way to grow functionality base of Grails.

With this in mind I decided to release the Red5 integration work as a separate plugin and have the Video plugin depend on that for the RTMP streaming. So if one person doesn’t want to use all the Video plugin functionality they can at least use the Red5 Integration functionality. If you’d like to check it out please find it in the grails plugins section of our site. One thing to note is the Red5 plugin comes packaged with the source code for Red5.

I am going to send an email to the Red5 team and see if they will keep me abreast of new functionality as it comes down the road so I can maintain the plugin. I’ll keep folks posted on what they say. Finally, I’d like to thank, the Red5 team for the their 0.6.3 WAR release of the Red5 server and Alexander zhukov who created Red5-minimal. The fact that Alexander was able to accomplish what he did let me know it was “in theory” possible to incorporate the functionality in a plugin and gave me inspiration during the dark times. If you become the next youtube with this Grails plugin, throw a brother a couple bucks…. do the right thing

You can find information about the plugin on our Grails Video Plugin Page.

And as with the Amazon S3 Plugin, this is a very preliminary version, and we’re hoping to get some good feedback from the Grails Community and you on what we can do better. However, there may be some bugs that we haven’t quite gotten to yet.

Feel free to leave comments regarding the plugin on this posting. We know we have a lot more testing to do and features to add, so any feedback is most welcome.

I’m amazed at the way the Red5 developers have been able to reverse engineer the protocol for the RTMP by observing byte streams - who wooda thunk. Check it out at - http://osflash.org/red5/discovery or check out this email discussion thread - http://osflash.org/pipermail/red5_osflash.org/2005-September/000134.html

Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with the Red5 technology the server is built in Java (Ruby version to come soon???) and the install was fairly easy. You can install both as a standalone server (Mac OSX) and deployed as Tomcat app (series of WARs). The standalone version uses Tomcat under the covers.

The demo flash apps included in the install were:

An app acting as as video broadcaster
An app that records a video stream to the server using flash
An app that is a chat room
An app that uses Shared Objects
A couple others…

They all worked fairly well, however, I ran into two problems. The first problem was not related to Red5 but that Flash did not recognize the video drivers (using an Intel MacBook Pro) and I had to change the preferences for Flash movies to use the USB Video Class.

The second problem was that the video quality was a little rough for the video recorder. Still working on the issue, please leave a comment if you have any ideas.

Finally, I found a great video tutorial site that covers some basics to setting up the Red5 server. It also, helped me setup a free development environment for Flash movies. Check it out - http://www.flashextensions.com/tutorials.php

Some of the videos are really basic and geared towards actionscript developers - i.e., setting up Eclipse - but I found some of the others pretty useful.

I agree with Adam’s thoughts in his previous post and have been very impressed with the activity in the Grails community. I subscribed to the user mailing list. Each day I receive from this list anywhere from 40-60 emails from users running into various issues on projects and folks from the Grails community providing their suggestions or troubleshooting tips. The activity of user/developer mailing lists is one of the most important benchmarks in determining the health of an open source framework - along with supplied functionality (obvious), core technology, the architects driving the vision, commercial support, documentation, check-in velocity and discussion in the blogosphere. To give an indication of the acceleration of activity in the Grails community, in October 2006 the same mailing list was averaging around 5-6 emails - almost a 10 fold increase in one year.***

Also, last week on the Grails user mailing list, there was some spirited debate on the level of Grails documentation (or lack of it) and whether it was appropriate for the release level of the framework. The amount of documentation right now doesn’t really concern me. What struck me the most about the dialog was the intensity of the debate. It shows the community is excited about what has been developed, are passionate to help out in whatever way they can, and care deeply about the frameworks success. And the community’s passion/enthusiasm for Groovy/Grails is clearly indicative of the framework’s ability to meet a need and fill a gap, something the community is looking for. IMHO this enthusiasm will be the driving force of success and perpetuate Grail’s momentum. And while more formal documentation is sure to come down the road, I’ve found the answer to most of the issues i’ve run into by querying the mailing list. It has been an excellent source of living documentation. - http://www.nabble.com/codehaus—grails-f11860.html

Of course with every new open source project there is always a lot of user/developer mailing list activity in the beginning. The question always becomes: Does this activity last, does it have staying power? With over a year and half of Grails development under their belt, a pending 1.0 release, and the clear need for a rapid application development framework in the J2EE architecture landscape, I have the feeling Grails is here to stay. Now I’m just trying to find the best way to support the growth…

That being said, one of our goals here at Cantina will be to leave some tips/issues that we run into as we develop plugins for the framework. Although it will not be formal documentation - we get our kicks from developing functionality - there may be some issue/tips that we run into that can be helpful to you. And please feel free to weigh in by leaving a comment if you know a better approach.

*** fyi, this calculation was performed with a VERY informal last year inspection of the mailing list on Nabble

UPDATE - 10/31/2007

I guess I should be been paying attention to the email threads a little better… Two email threads -

http://www.nabble.com/number-of-people-companies-using-Grails-tf4721318.html

and

http://www.nabble.com/Mailing-lists-statistics-tf4693805.html#a13416495

also discuss the growing activity of the mailing list.