How difficult is it to administer FMS if our IT folks have little or no training in ActionScript?
Graeme Bull - Feb 05, 2007
These are all great questions and come from a person who is not already working on Flash Media Server and Flash, which I like to hear from because it helps me get out of my box a bit. By a box, I mean that since I'm so used to FMS, I don't really think about some of the worries that others might have if they have never touched the software because I know that those aren't the difficult issues. Anyways, on with the show then:
The question: First, how difficult is it to administer FMS if our IT folks have little or no training in ActionScript?
AND
How easy is it to learn?
These are related questions I think, so lets see if I can cover them a bit here.
The answers:
To administer Flash Media Server, little or no Actionscript experience is needed I think. Now, I could be wrong in what "administering" means, but I have the impression that this covers install, settings changing and keeping an eye on applications and instances of those applications.
So to do that, all you really need is experience installing software and then stopping and starting services when you make changes to the settings. For the settings, it's all written out in XML and can be viewed with a common text file reader like notepad if you use Windows. THere are about 6 settings files in all and are full of comments on what each setting does, so it's not too easy to get lost there. Although I have found that some are a bit cryptic, those are the ones you don't really need to mess with. The Adobe techs have done a pretty good job there.
The only area that you need actionscript experience and knowledge is actually creating the applications. Both the client and server side coding is in actionscript. So I suppose in a way, if you had actionscript knowledge, it might help you administer the application if you could understand why a certain application is sucking up all the resources of the server or something because then you would be able to look at the files and see the problem. I'm not sure if that falls under administration tasks though.
The next part is whether FMS is easy to learn. Now that's a bit of an interesting question in itself, but I feel the answer should be yes. In reality, you don't need much knowledge at all to run applications on FMS and I think in the case of this person, they want to do lots of video streaming. Video streaming is simple really, I think there are free players out there that work with FMS, or even just the FLVcomponent in the Flash IDE works great. Place your videos on your server and you're just about done. So, in that respect, learning how to develop applications with FMS is not hard.
It will all depend on the application and how much functionality it has for whether or not the development learning curve and even administration difficulty will be.
So to sum that all up somehow, I feel that administering Flash Media Server really isn't that hard. Install it and for the most part just leave the default settings as they are. There are a couple of items to change, but the rest of the defaults work great for most apps. When it comes to actually using the technology for your own sites and apps, then the level of difficulty on learning to develop on it will be directly affected by the amount of functionality that your app has. If you already have a good knowledge of Actionscript, then developing shouldn't be too hard at all, you'll just need to understand how live apps work now and the things to think about when developing them.