Neal Feierabend

Bentham is a software system I originally created for use in a counseling program at NAU. Essentially, it is designed to allow students participating in practicum to record their counseling sessions with participants for later review, as well as providing a live video and audio stream to supervisors who can provide “bug-in-ear,” live feedback to the student. The system is based on several open source software components, and is also open source and available under the MIT license on GitHub.

The backbone of the system that allows the streaming and recording of the video and audio is the Red5 server. This great piece of software is designed to replicate many of the functionalities of the Flash Media Server, is written and developed against in Java, and unfortunately is limited to recording in Flash (a post for another time). As such, the clients, both the viewing and the recording, are programmed in ActionScript3. Finally, the web interface is developed in PHP using the CakePHP framework and MySQL as the back end database. I’ll have plenty more to say about this project in the future, as I hope to continue improving upon the basic functionality.