Blog Posts From Ignite Realtime Blog Tagged With flash

Adobe to Open Flash Platform Messaging Protocol

communityadmin@igniterealtime.org — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:04:10 GMT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 20, 2009 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced plans to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification, more..

This is good news for the Red5 project and the Red5 plugin for Openfire with the Red5phone Flash phone. It will be interesting to see if the XMPP Standards council will give the Jingle RTMP Transport proposal another consideration.

Flash-based Audio and Video in Spark, SparkWeb and Openfire

communityadmin@igniterealtime.org — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:08:54 GMT

When SparkWeb became open-source, I took a look at the source code and found it had more features than the Flex-based XMPP client I was co-developing for the Red5 Plugin. It therefore made sense to migrate the Flash audio and video features we had developed for our client to SparkWeb and make it compatible with the Spark and Openfire Red5 Plugins and package it as part of the Red5 plugin. The downside to this that the modifications to the Red5 version of SparkWeb makes it out of sync with the official SVN and it could possibly become a fork requiring a name change later on.

So what does the Red5 SparkWeb offer?

A plugin container for SparkWeb. I noticed that quite a number of users are asking for a plugin to deploy SparkWeb. My advice would be to try the Red5 Plugin.

Configure Index.html and point your users at

http://your_server:nnnn/red5_webapp_name/sparkweb

Where nnnn is your HTTP-BIND port number (default 7070) and red5_webapp_name is your default red5 web application name (default red5)
Enables use of the Red5 plugin audio and video features with both Spark and SparkWeb. You can't do video messaging and the video roster is replaced with visual presence (see below). You can make audio/video calls and share your desktop with your contacts. Each call record is logged in openfire and can be queried by the administrator with the Openfire SIP plugin.
Makes SIP phone calls between Spark and SparkWeb users. All SparkWeb SIP calls are logged with the Openfire SIP plugin as well.
Provides webcam support. If you have a webcam installed on your PC, it will be automatically detected and will be used instead of your vcard photo. You can disable this in index.html. You can add or replace your vcard photo with a snapshot of your webcam when you edit your profile. You can also publish snapshots from your webcam as visual presence to all your contacts. What this means is that all your contacts will have a snapshot of your webcam in their rosters. The interval between snapshots is 60 secs by default and can be modified in index.html. See a draft copy of my proposal to extend XMPP with visual presence. Please feel free to post comments at the bottom of the document.

I also made a few cosmetic changes to my taste and added sound effects for incoming calls and instant messaging. I added some code to improve the loss of focus detection by tracking Flash application activation/deactivation messages and mouse movement. If you use Internet explorer and enable pop-ups, you will get a pop-up in the bottom right corner of the screen with a photo, name and first line of the incoming messaging if you are outside of SparkWeb when a new message arrives.

I am hoping to add fastpath support and a calendar to SparkWeb next.

SparkWeb: Next Generation

communityadmin@igniterealtime.org — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:36:26 GMT

One of the new things other than clustering in Openfire Enterprise 3.4 is a new release of SparkWeb. This marks a number of major transitions for it:

Simplified Installation

First, it's now built into Openfire Enterprise. No more downloading a separate plugin, and no configuration required. You'll find it in a new sidebar item in the "enterprise" tab of the admin console.

Moving to Flash

!http://dscoder.com/sparkwebflex.png|style=float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:5px;|src=http://dscoder.com/sparkwebflex.png!

Second is that it's entirely new code. As we worked on the original SparkWeb, we ran into many limitations of the "ajax" (html + CSS + javascript + xmlhttprequest) platform, including browser compatibility issues, difficulty with localization, and the inability to support any sort of richer collaboration experience like voice or video. As a result, Derek DeMoro wrote a prototype of a web based XMPP client in Flash, using XIFF and Adobe's new Flex API. The new SparkWeb is descended from that, rather than from the previous version.

Work In Progress

There's good and (temporary) bad with this transition. The new code supports vcards and avatars, and is significantly smaller, resulting in quicker page loading. There's also a revamped UI, including contact list filtering much like Spark has. On the other hand, group chat support and secure connections are not quite ready in the new code, and are planned for the next minor Openfire Enterprise release.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post them in the ~~Openfire Enterprise Support forum~~