We provide online educational applications to schools and use
Java2D and jxta for P2P. Think of it as a combo on education with
mini-game like environment. A large activity may contain over 200
questions and approach 200MB in audio and images.
We use Peer2Peer (jxta) to download jars to one student ...
then the other (~35) students download from the first student. This
is to reduce bandwidth strain on DSL or T-1 pipe often running on
older (i.e., slower) PC equipment.
We are looking at Flex. Our application is dynamic in the
sense that the next "scene/question" will vary depending on how a
student answers a question. That is, it is not a straight, linear
"video" ... but an interactive Q&A session. We read that Flex
supports "streaming".
QUESTION -- Is this "streaming" only for linear "video" clips
... or can it act as "lazy loading" whereby a student just begins
downloading what he needs at the moment without trying to download
clips he will not need until later?
ALSO, I can see how this streaming would be great for one
user ... but how would it work if there were 36 users/students all
trying to "stream" through the same relatively small pipe (DSL or
T-1)?
Or is there some way to "cache" these audio/image resources
so that the first student downloads it, and remaining students do
not do remote download from server, but download from first student
... i.e., P2P-like?
BOTTOM LINE -- Would Flex "streaming" work on a DSL or T-1
for 36 simultaneous users/students trying to pull down a lot of MBs
of audio and image resources?
