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In this post I will talk about steps I went through to install Red5 Server on my machine using Windows 7 64 bit.

This first and most obvious step is to get a version of Red5. So on Red5 website under Downloads I clicked Releases and downloaded the latest version. After downloading run the executable. At one point installation asked what’s the sever IP where Red5 will be running or something like that I typed – 127.0.0.1, which is the IP for localhost. Then it asked for port. As I understood this it can be any available port. I’ve chose 8088, but I believe the default Red5 port is 5080.

After installation is complete go to Start > {Right Click} Computer > Manage. Under “Services and Applications” choose Services and find Red5 service in the list. Right click on it and select Start. After Red5 service has been started you can try running it by going to “http://localhost:{your installation port [see above]}/” in your browser. After you do that you should see Red5 start up page where you can choose to view and install demos.

And that’s pretty much it. I’ve also installed Red5 using Red5 repository inside Eclipse Java EE IDE. I don’t know any advantages of that besides that using Red5 Eclipse plugin you can easily created your own Red5 projects. It also generates basic MXML project for you with NetConnection class and all listeners attached to it. Which gives you a nice start up point. You can test and debug your Red5 application easily using Eclipse debugger. My knowledge of Java is very basic so I don’t know when and if I’m going to write my own Java code.

I’ll post my experience with Red5 Java as I start doing more advance application using Red5 Server. The default generated project should do the trick for most Red5 Flash applications.

XML is a great way to organize and pass information to an application. I’ve used a lot in the past. It doesn’t require any kind of server side scripts or databases. But XML file size is just too big compared to Action Message Format data size.

If server supports PHP and MySQL or just PHP, it makes more sense to pass data between client-server through fast, binary AMF. AMF can use other server remoting technologies, but I use PHP and it works for me. Before I’ve used AMFPHP, now I use Zend Framework with AMF support. I use it whenever I need application-data interaction.