For those of you who have frequented my blog in the past, you’re probably wondering where all the content has gone! It turns out that I had migrated to WordPress from BlogCFC and felt that I could reinvent the site towards my current focus within the industry. For the rest who are new to this site I’ll provide a brief understanding of who I am and explain how I’ll be adding value to the community.
In late 2005 an interesting open source project was just getting kicked around on a mailing list. Not strangers to open source were John Grden and Chris Allen who took on the project management roles. I quickly joined the team committing to what would become a staple in my life for the last 3 years. That project was later named Red5 (original concept).
Red5 of course has a star wars significance. It was Luke Skywalker’s callsign in the Battle of Yavin, during the Galactic Civil War
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Regardless, Red5 turned out to capture my interest and seal my fate as it had sealed Luke’s fate. A strange twist on words led to work with a talented developer Luke Hubbard and yeah yeah, the force must have been with him. Luke had a solid understanding of protocols and integration of open source technologies such as MINA and Spring while I started work on adding file format parsing to the io (input/output) library. Later on, we picked up some great contributions from random developers and during that time some fresh legs joined the effort to continue the work on an evolving server. Joachim quickly entered and implemented support for mp3 and amf remoting to name just a few. Paul gave us the support for tomcat and has continued to add value to the server. Now, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will Red5 be built in a day. It turns out we are now in 2008 and we’ve reached 0.7 in our timeline. For Red5, this site will stand as a personal perspective of the platform and offer guidance to those who are new and old.
Through the years, I’ve also been developing with Flex, Flash, Java and all technologies in between. I hope to transfer some of my experience and expectations of these languages in future posts.
Last, I am also a core developer on 2 new projects that aren’t yet released to the public. I’ll name just one for the time being and allude to the second in future posts. During my experience with Red5 and building applications focusing on live, real-time applications, I’ve found that there is a void in terms of framework and expertise is designing these types of applications. Many developers understand the API’s but rarely build reusable components on top of reusable frameworks. Worse yet, there are currently no viable frameworks for building UI components for real-time development. It’s in these areas that I hope Jedai, a new open source framework will succeed! The project is not yet open and I am trying my hardest to make this possible in the near future. We’ve already seen some great expectations of the framework and our hope is that others will contribute to the project once it is released. Until then, I’ll relay details and announcements through this site.
There’s far more information than I can explain in my first post, so I’ll leave it at that. If your interested in any of these projects and aren’t sure where to begin, please leave a comment or wait for my next post where I’ll try to explain how you can join the open source community.
. Regardless, this may be interesting for some of you who have been wondering if this was possible.