Broadcast message to FMS without flash

The other day a client contacted us in order to fill out an enhacement request.

We developed for him several multiuser applications that he rents per day. Everything runs under FMS and he manages it via a web-based admin tool we built too.

He had the need to broadcast a maintenance message to all connected vhost admins via a web-form. We can’t use flash for this because the admin tool is cell-phone compatible for remote administration. Flash lite is not an option at this time.

I asked around to see if someone had done something like this but nothing. I even considered moving from FMS to red5 because of the ability to use red5’s Java classes for this purpose. This client commented us several ideas to extend the admin tool so being able to integrate the real-time/multiuser server with a backend language is a must.

Charlie, a wowza guy, sent an email to the flashmedialist saying that the wowza server had an http administration. Wowza server requires a license so it is not an option but this remind me of something. I remembered reading smth about http based administration with FMS. I did a quick search and found it!

Download the pdf - managing flash media server - and go directly to page 71 and start reading.

What we did is to create a generic server-side method that will receive the maintenance message and display it to all connected admins.

For example:

http://srvrnme:1111/admin/broadcastMsg?scope=App:daApp&method=receiveBroadcast&arg0=sample%20message

Cool huh? We execute this using curl inside a vhost list loop.

There are other possibilities so be sure to check out the pdf.

Hope this helps someone!

— fernando