More Open Source from Adobe – Text Layout Framework and Open Source Media Framework (OSMF)

Adobe and Open Source? Definitely a success story – with more projects being announced. The latest additions to the Adobe Open Source portfolio are the Text Layout Framework (TLF) and the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). The Text Layout Framework – which is already used within Flex Gumbo and Flash CS4 – solves many of the problems we had with Flash and text layout in the past, and adds some cool new features:

• Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others
• Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images
• Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography
• Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens
• Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing
• Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components.

Finally Flash can be used in the Middle East as well. Something that only has been possible with commercial extensions for bidirectional text.

Adobe Text Layout Framework (TLF) Open Source now

The TLF can be extended with custom code, and that code can be contributed to the project as well. While it is good to see the powerful new text features being released as open source software, the Flash community is still waiting for Flash Player bug FP-40 to be fixed! What use is it to have those features, if you cannot enter non-ASCII chars in Flash apps on Linux with Firefox?

The other project – the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) – aims at solving a much larger problem. Elad Elrom has the best explanation of OSMF I’ve seen so far in his blog.

OSMF is an open source (vanity license) AS3 media framework that supports the workflow around video playback and monetization. Video players have different features set. The skins are different and the integration is different as well as the architecture workflow. But they do essentially the same thing and can be created using the OSMF framework. The framework is based on the quality of the video player (OVP) and addresses the common challenges.

Adobe vanity license means that it’s ok to use and redistribute. Modifications can be submitted to Adobe for redistribution.

The foundation of the framework is Qos (quality of service), which focuses on OVP and provides a quick start for playing videos (smallest buffer size needed to start the video), efficient connection logic, and switching bitrates dynamically (recall metric monitor service in OVP).

The framework by itself is not powerful without having the CDNs and the publishers onboard. Adobe OSMF is based on the “chicken and the egg” theory, meaning which will come first? In fact, Adobe is currently trying to get the publishers and the CDNs onboard and it seem that they got very positive responses. The idea is that each CDN will integrate their plugins to the OSMF framework and the publisher will be able to easily switch CDNs.

I recommend that you read the full blog post if you are interest in the OSMF. The source code can be downloaded here. While some people may argue, that Flash and video might very soon be obsolete due to HTML 5 and the video tag, I doubt that. It’s good to see open standards based video for the web – but HTML 5 is still far from what you can do with Flash, video, streaming, quality-of-service, access to webcam and microphone. Actually there’s no other RIA technology – including Silverlight and JavaFX – with simple, cross-platform access to webcams and microphones.