Preparing development environment
Before starting this section i will assume you downloaded Red5 and got it running on your system using the latest stable archive release (Following the previous lesson follow-up). In this section, we will see how to prepare the red5 application development environment.
Red5 project is built and maintained using Apache Maven. Maven is a dependency managed build system. Any Red5 application that you build can use maven to pull red5 dependencies and build-deploy the final output in whatever form you wish. With maven, you will have to worry less about "what version of the library" to use when building against a particular version of Red5. Download and install Maven on your system following instructions from its official site. Ensure that maven path is added to system environment PATH. To test your maven setup just open your console and try the maven mvn command.
Maven Check
NOTE: Don't worry about the "ERROR" in the console, it just means maven is installed but it didn't find a project to work on. :)
Being an open source platform, development for Red5 can be done with almost any open IDE. It is however recommended to use Eclipse as a development IDE for Red5 application programming. Use a Red5 JEE based distribution preferably newer. I personally use eclipse Luna - Version: Luna Service Release 2 (4.4.2) : Build id: 20150219-0600). You can use luna or any newer version of Eclipse. At the time of writing this, Eclipse NEON is making waves out there.
Red5 eclipse plugin was originally engineered by Dominick Accattato. Its a little old now and a lot of people don't use/recommend it. However, personally i have had a great amount of success using it and it saves me a lot of development / debugging time. The Red5 eclipse plugin can be used to quickly publish your application to ared5 instance and debug pretty quickly. (with some 'cough', 'cough' quirks). To install the Red5Plugin use eclipse's built in software installer. You can find all the information needed (step by step picture guide) to install the eclipse plugin from its GIT repository.
In the next piece of this 'development series', we shall try to understand the Red5 application structure. This is an important part before we dive into coding an application. The different elements of the application structure will help understand how a red5 application works and how it is handled by the media server.