Inside Adobe’s Open Source Framework
Adobe Systems recently announced the immediate release of two new open source technologies for its Adobe Flash Platform. OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) and TLF (Text Layout Framework) are geared toward developers, publishers and media companies looking to create new revenue strategies and business opportunities for publishing media-rich content on the web. Formerly a part of the Strobe project, OSMF provides developers with the ability to build feature-rich, advanced media players for the Flash Platform in a easier, faster and more efficient manner. With TLF, developers can introduce more robust typographic functionality to a wide variety of web-based applications.
To no surprise, these frameworks are being rapidly adopted by the open source community. Mark Stanley, founder of online content publishing company makebook, says its developers are already benefitting from TLF. “APIs that are standard in the open source Text Layout Framework from Adobe gave us a jumpstart as we leveraged the high-end components for makebook.com.” This particular framework goes far beyond the text layouts enabled by programming technologies such as CSS and HTML as it supports bidirectional text, complex server-side languages, multi-columns and other typographical capabilities. According to Stanley, “With TLF we can more easily provide our customers with quality typography features and the text layout control they require for their self-publishing projects.”
Dave McAllister, Adobe spokesperson and director of standards and open source platform BU, said Adobe was prompted to open OSMF and TLF to the developer community for wider acceptance of the technology. “With regards to the Text Layout Framework (TLF) — for displaying text, designers and publishers have mostly stuck with HTML, but HTML and CSS have their limits. Flash Player 10, which includes a text engine with TLF, provides better control over text attributes. Moreover, as a browser plug-in that is not affected by the idiosyncrasies of specific browsers, Flash Player also makes it much easier to ensure a uniform look and feel across browsers and operating systems.”
Adobe’s wealth of typographical expertise provided the opportunity to give the text-handling ability in Flash Player a radical upgrade, with contributions from across the company including the InDesign team. The first fruit of this effort was the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. A beta of the Text Layout Framework (TLF), built on this new text engine, was released on Adobe Labs late last year to provide print-quality text rendering and sophisticated layouts, using device as well as embedded fonts, in a wide array of alphabets.
Releasing the TLF source code as open source empowers developers to extend and enhance TLF to suit their own needs and to contribute to the evolution of the framework. Regarding the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) – for building media players on the Flash Platform, publishers have historically either built their own players or adopted solutions from third parties. There wasn’t a single standard media player, and as a result it was hard to keep up with the latest media playback features, like Dynamic Streaming, and hard to integrate third-party services, like advertising. The goal of OSMF, now in public alpha as an open source project, is to enable developers to easily assemble pluggable components to create high-quality, enhanced playback experiences. Adobe opened up the framework to enable collaborative development for web video monetization, with lower costs and faster turnaround. Because media players are an integration point for multiple providers, OSMF lends itself to an open source project where all parties can cooperatively establish standard interfaces. OSMF is intended to facilitate the development and sharing of open standards and best practices for video player applications built on the Adobe Flash Platform.”
Although OSMF and TLF are being dubbed as “open-source,” there are some key components that will remain proprietary. “OSMF source code and pluggable software components, as well as source code and component library for TLF are available at no charge under the Mozilla Public License,” McAllister says. “Adobe has released a number of technologies into open source, relating to the Flash Platform.” For a complete list, please see Adobe.
OSMF and TLF are not the first Flash technologies Adobe openly released to the developer community. Previous initiatives have consisted of Flex and its compilers, as well as the Tamarin virtual machine. When asked what makes OSMF and TLF different, McAllister states, “The Tamarin project, which is based on code contributed from Adobe, is designed to implement an open engine for ActionScript. Tamarin will be used by Mozilla within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox, Mozilla’s free web browser, as well as within the ActionScript Virtual Machine within Adobe Flash Player.”
Flex is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems. The Flex SDK provides the core Flex compilers, component library and debugger. “Using only the free SDK and IDE of choice, developers can freely build and deploy rich Flex applications,” McAllister says.
TLF is designed to be used with Adobe Flex or Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, and is already included in Flex 4 beta, code named “Gumbo.” Developers can use or extend existing components, or use the open source framework to create their own text components.
OSMF is an AS3 code that runs on version 10 of the Flash Player. Developers can use OSMF in Adobe Flex or Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, as well as in third party tools for ActionScript development, McAllister adds.
Adobe’s new open source initiatives offer many advantages to the web community as a whole. However, there is no denying that developers and end users will benefit the most from these technologies. “OSMF will enable developers to quickly and easily build more robust, feature-rich media players based on the Adobe Flash Platform. The flexible OSMF architecture enables developers to easily create unique playback experiences and help to improve user experience by monitoring & responding to QoS metrics.
Now, developers using Flash Professional or Flex can directly discuss ideas and proposals with project committers, submit code through the open Flex bug and issue tracking system, available at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex, or contribute enhancements directly to the TLF project. By providing the developers access to the ActionScript source code for TLF, they can more easily debug their applications and extend or modify the capabilities of TLF to meet their specific customer requirements. Both OSMF and TLF can be leveraged by Open Screen Project member projects as well as other interested developers, publishers and media companies.”
Moving forward, Adobe is looking to remain active in its open source initiatives and is said to have numerous projects in the works. “Adobe is active in open source projects and activities. We work directly with contributions to existing projects, like SQLite, and Eclipse, and indirectly by supporting Adobe products on open source operating distributions, such as making Adobe Reader and Flash Player available on Linux operating systems. Adobe research and development around other open source projects can be found in the Adobe Source Libraries,” McAllister says.
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