Adobe Unveils Two New Open Source Projects

Today we’re announcing two more projects going up on opensource.adobe.com and becoming part of the open source family at Adobe. The first is the Text Layout Framework, which comes from some of the advancements we made in Flash Player 10 to improve text support in Flash Player. The other is the Open Source Media Framework, which was known by the codename “Strobe” and provides a robust framework for media playback of any kind (video, audio, dynamic SWFs).

The Text Layout Framework (TLF) is something that’s going to be a huge boon to developers. If you’ve been working with text in the new Flex 4 components then you’ve been working with the Text Layout Framework. If you haven’t seen the demo you can check it out over on Labs. It was created by a group that is just a few blocks north of me and does a great job of showing off the features of the new TLF. Now that the Text Layout Framework is open source you can push, pull, and extend it to your heart’s content. A great example of this in action is the New York Times Reader and the Boston Globe Reader – both of which wouldn’t have been possible without the Text Layout Framework.

The other project we’re releasing is the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I’ve been digging into the documentation a bit and I’m excited about what this means for rich media and the Flash Platform. The OSMF includes hooks for any kind of media type the Flash Player supports including images, audio, SWF content, and of course video. Using the framework you can create your own media players and the OSMF provides a set of powerful baseline functionality. It has hooks for creating your own plug-ins for metrics, advertising, and other functions. It has support for both progressive download and streaming built in as well as all of the video controls and functionality. And there isn’t any UI associated with the OSMF so you can integrate it into your application however you want.

I encourage you to download the source code and check out the samples. There are some good examples that show how to go about building plugins, how to use the composite media features (so you can support a number of different media types in one player), and how to build UI components on top of the framework.