I've decided it's high time to bite the bullet and learn a bit of our favorite four-letter word, Java. I've been itching to get into some serious red5 development lately.

For those of you not familiar, red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that lets you do very cool things like flash remoting, sharing objects between Flex apps and Java, and more. What does this mean?

In-browser videochat, multiplayer games that update in real-time, live steaming video recording from your browser to my server, etc. Cool, huh?

So, my plan for getting started has been the following:

1) Setting up Eclipse with the Flex Builder Plugin on my Ubuntu 8.10 box ( this was a story in itself )
2) Setting up red5 on my development box ( v.7 stable .deb downloads at http://osflash.org/red5/070final )
3) Playing with the demos at http://localhost:5080/demos ... and subsequently breaking the shoddy 64-bit Adobe flash player... GRUMBLE
3.5) Buying a webcam :)
4) Ordering two books: "The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development" and "Beginning POJOS" (POJOs are 'plain-old-java-objects' for the unacquainted )
5) Checking out a few tutorials online- see http://osflash.org/red5/help
6) Writing this post.

Seriously, I hope to chronicle my learning experiences here to give something back to the community. red5 is still a pretty niche topic at this point and I hope that this will be helpful to others learning...Let's do it together, hey hey.