flexonrails.net

JRuby is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting projects out there. Primarily because it makes it possible for Ruby developers to take advantage of all the technologies that have been built in Java. In particular, it makes it possible to take advantage of one of the other most exciting projects out there: Red 5.

Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that supports:

• Streaming Audio/Video (FLV and MP3)
• Recording Client Streams (FLV only)
• Shared Objects
• Live Stream Publishing
• Remoting

Red 5 is, or very soon will be, a viable free, open source alternative to Flash Media Server. Most important of all to the Ruby community is the fact that Red 5 recently added a scripting framework that makes it possible to use it with Ruby (via JRuby), as well as Javascript (via Rhino), Python (via Jython), and Groovy. Though, even if there was no scripting framework in Red 5, it should now be relatively easy to do using a simple wrapper class in Java that loads your Ruby classes using the new scripting framework in Java 6.

To get started with Red 5 and Ruby, first download a copy of Red 5, then check out this tutorial by Paul Gregoire.

If you want to try to use Rails with from the scripting framework in Red 5, then be sure to read the ‘Gotchas’ at the bottom of this page.

More to come on this in future posts.