Local Flash Peer-to-Peer Communication over LAN (without Stratus)
August 27th, 2010
Some of you guys were probably wondering how to establish P2P connections in the local network (LAN) without Stratus. Yes. It’s possible. Using native IP-only multicast. Let’s build a simple chat with Posting. Adding Multicast broadcast is just a simple next step which I am sure you can accomplish by yourself with few hints from my article about Multicast
Open an IP Multicast connection. This can be done by specifying connection string as “rtmpf:”. Note, that this technique cannot be used for one-to-one communication. So no DIRECT_CONNECTIONS with NetStream, but you can do all RTMFP Group operations.
netConnection.connect("rtmfp:");
P2P Chat with NetGroup in Flash Player 10.1
July 8th, 2010
This videotutorial is a follow-up of my tutorial Simple chat with P2P NetGroup in FP 10.1.
Peer-to-peer chat with NetGroup in Flash Player 10.1 (ADC video link)
Multicast Streaming in Flash Player 10.1 Tutorial
June 30th, 2010
Adobe Developer Connection presents:
Multicast Streaming in Flash Player 10.1
This video-tutorial shows how to build a simple Broadcaster/Receiver system with P2P Multicast in Flash Player 10.1 using NetStream and Camera classes.
Learn more: Read Multicast Explained in Flash Player 10.1
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Directed Routing Explained in Flash 10.1 P2P
June 4th, 2010
Directed Routing enables you to send data to a specific client in the peer-to-peer group (NetGroup). It requires stable and correct topology to work well - still it’s very useful.
There has been already something written about directed routing. But I’d like to share with you much more.
First, let me explain you which methods does what. You have basically three main functions sendToNearest, sendToNeighbor and sendToAllNeighbors. See image below.
Image: Peer-to-Peer Directed Routing in Flash Player 10.1 [Bigger image]
Continue reading to understand how it all works.
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P2P GroupSpecifier Class Explained In Details Part 1
March 11th, 2010
If you’ve tried my tutorial on creating a simple chat using P2P NetGroup in Flash Player 10.1, you might have been wondering what the other parameters you can set up mean.
GroupSpecifier is a very powerful class and ASDocs are good resource to look in, but I thought I’d write few more words on this topic since it’s easier to understand with a little more explanation.
postingEnabled and multicastEnabled
These are self-explanatory. Just a little note: the difference between Multicast and Posting is simply in the overhead used during their management. Posting should be used when you have lots of senders sending relatively little data (like Chat). Multicast when you have fewer senders sending lots of data (Video, Chat).
peerToPeerDisabled
Why should I disable P2P when I am building a P2P application? Obvious question. This one is for IP Multicast.
Application-Level-Multicast (so called P2P Multicast) is multicast established over peers.
Native IP Multicast is multicast enabled in the network - it must be supported by routers and the network itself.
Fusion is Application-Level-Multicast and Native IP Multicast used together.
So, when you disable P2P by saying peerToPeerDisabled=true, your app will use only Native IP Multicast, which is more efficient, but works mostly only in closed networks (like a company network).
serverChannelEnabled
Opens supporting functions from the server. In the basic scenario it enables auto-bootstrapping. Bootstrapping in this context means adding peers to the group. You can do this manually by calling the addBootstrapPeer function or setting serverChannelEnabled=true to make it automatic. In the P2P Chat example it basically takes care of adding peers to a group and establishes communication between them.
groupspecWithAuthorizations and groupspecWithoutAuthorizations
Difference? Security. If you set a posting or multicast password, the one “with” can post or multicast, the one “without” is receive-only.
Remember - GroupSpecifier is technically a String combined of properties and the name. If you change a property you will be in a different group.
More to come soon.
