Hi all,

My objective is to get back to web development. I've been away for a little while and I'm sure that there have been many changes.

I'm interested in developing a site which will stream audio and video on demand.

My desired environment would consist of Linux based open source components. My distro of choice is Ubuntu. I've been using Tomcat, Java Servlets, frameworks such as Cocoon and Struts, and MySQL as the database.

I have heard of Spring and other frameworks.
As development goes today, what is your recommended solutions?
Are there open source solutions already built that I can extend for my needs?
What open source tools (WYSIWYG) do you recommend for web page design?
I've heard of DarwinStreamingServer and IceCast. Do you recommend these or are there better choices?

You may also recommend bandwidth and system requirements as well.

Thanks for your recommendations.

I haven't used it, but this could be what you need:

http://osflash.org/red5

Flash is important for multimedia over the Web because it's the only thing beyond HTML and Javascript that you can be sure will work on pretty much any client. The older generation of streaming media products that require setting up specialized players deliver such a poorer user experience that they are basically dead.

WRT Web development generally, the big shift has been the emergence of effective MVC frameworks, which has changed every aspect of how sites are constructed (for the better). One of the effects has been that WYSIWYG tools have been rendered obsolete - your framework keeps the presentation templates clean enough that you can write them in a text editor, and there will be a bundled Web server that can run a development copy of your site and will automatically update as you change the code. Django and Rails are the big names, but the key features are the same for all of them.

Since you are already working with Java, JRuby on Rails could be a good choice. Netbeans is a free Java IDE from Sun that supports JRuby on Rails and Spring, and is easy to install.

Thanks, hob, for your response.

I will research your suggestions. Very helpful.

Does Eclipse not support JRuby on Rails and Spring?

I beleive that it supports Spring, and that there are Eclipse-based products for JRuby on Rails. My own interest is mainly in JRuby, and I've found the current release of Netbeans to be excellent, so haven't investigated the alternatives much further.