On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Dennis Coonich <[email protected]>wrote:

Amazing - was just looking into embedding applets into xwiki for streaming media from local or remote sources. You beat me to it. I would still like to integrate homegrown java ee applets, jsf and other java technologies. Can you point me to some good reference material? I teach java swing and java ee courses but have not looked at all into the depths of xwiki's framework(s).

Again - amazing work.

Thanks! That was sort of the "demo"/proof-of-concept version... i'm working on an update that should be more useful, and with 500+ NPR feeds including affiliate stations, a better selection/search mechanism using Exhibit ( e.g. http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents.html ), etc. Wr/t your applet question, here's what I've found, and why I didn't bother with applets: Bottom line: applets cause problems and user complaints. Flash doesn't. For example: there's potential issues with IE & Java, if you use JMF in your applet ( http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jmf/2.1.1/guide/JMFApp...), then you need to specially install the JMF jar on your browser ( http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jmf/2.1.1/jmfdiagnosti...). The lack of an easy "one click" means of install (like w/ flash) to get JMF and Java installed multiplatform and consistently -- is a showstopper. At least for windows and IE, there's the "JMF Windows Performance Pack":

Microsoft IE with the JMF Windows Performance Pack and you still see this message, then its possible that you don't have the latest Microsoft Java VM for IE installed. Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/java and install the latest Java VM for your browser.

http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/ is sort of typical with what happens with video and applets. The page for the applet states to look at http://www.flumotion.com site to see the applet in action. And yet, all the video playing on the company's site is now done with flash and they're no longer using the applet. If you get anything working and integrated with Xwiki for media applets, please share. The more the merrier. What would be best is to have an overarching "smart" mechanism for detecting media playback capabilities, and determining the most optimal strategy "dynamically" based on client platform/plugins and media type/quality of streaming media for display. On Apr 10 I alluded to this in a message "integrating media streaming with xwiki? (was Re: [xwiki-devs] Problems with scripting)" ( http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08533.html ) It would be nice to have a truly abstract streaming media macro that would

implement the same generic API for streaming media within Xwiki. The macro would determine at run-time, whether the browser is enabled with specific plugins needed to display a specific media type (such as the VLC moz plugin); if not available, the macro would dynamically switch-in the flash-based equivalent for people using IE or who don't want to install the VLC moz plugin. For example given a "mp4", the macro would first attempt to use VLC, on failure it might try the platform's browser-embeddable media presenter if media-compatible (e.g. MS windows media), and would finally try a "generic" flash player such as the Jeroen "JW" Wijering players ( http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/ ).

Due to the near ubiquitous installation of Itunes/Quicktime on most mac/windows systems -- the ability to automatically detect Quicktime plugin presence in the browser and determine if media is compatible would be a great feature to have in this "abstract/smart streaming macro" -- Niels http://nielsmayer.com