MAX 2009: Peer Assisted Networking w/Flash Builder

Michael Thornburgh -- co-creator of the RTMFP (Real-Time Media Flow Protocol) -- gave his second lab today -- "Build a Scalable Interactive Video Solution using Peer Assisted Networking in Flash Builder." Most of the students in this lab had their interests piqued by attending the "P2P on the Flash Platform with RTMFP" session by Matthew Kaufman -- the other co-creator of RTMFP. RTMFP enables peer-to-peer communications (including audio, data, and video) between Flash Player 10.1 clients. The clients endpoints connect up to the RTMFP server which acts as a rendezvous service by establishing communications between the Flash Player endpoints. The latest edition to the server and client supports a Group Specification -- which implements some security by enabling clients to create custom groups to dis/allow other clients to connect. The Group Specification is enabled via NetGroup class addition to flash.net package in AS3.

What was interesting in this lab was nearly everyone went on to Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus) and obtained a Developer Key for the Status server. Stratus is the code name for the server that implements RTMFP. It is a Adobe hosted service and only publicly available via the Labs site. For this lab Michael used an update, local version on his laptop. The focus of the lab is building a viewer app in either Flex 3 or FB4. Michael's laptop acted as both RTMFP server and the publisher (using his web cam). The student apps connect to Michael's Macbook and join a NetGroup. Once in the group, the clients can connect to one another to see the published stream. So instead of all 50 iMacs in the room connecting to the published stream on Michael's laptop, the clients connect once to get the group identifier, then pull the stream from a peer in the room.