| Welcome to The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development. The concept of “open source” has been around for a while now, and most people are familiar with its meaning, but how does that relate to Adobe Flash, which is a traditionally closed platform? When people talk about open source Flash, they can mean any number of things—an ActionScript library, a code editor, a new messaging format—what’s important is that the project extends or supports Flash and follows the open source methodology. One of the leading lights in the open source Flash world is Aral Balkan, and he put together the OSFlash.org website that brought together all of the existing disparate open source Flash projects into one focused community. This community blossomed to produce some incredible projects that not only expanded the possibilities of what Flash can do but also completely altered people’s perceptions of what Flash meant as a tool and how SWF files could be created.
This book is a collection of some of the best of those projects. We’ve collected projects that run the whole gamut of the open source Flash world so you can get an idea of just what sort of power is available to you. Alongside the project-specific chapters, we’ve also gone into a lot of detail on how these projects can be integrated to make a full open source SWF workflow or how you can pick and choose the projects that you want to use to expand your existing workflow. After all, it’s one thing to experiment with these projects at home, but their real use is to empower your current workflow to make Flash a bigger, better, faster, and more fun field to work within.
Adobe has also started an open source initiative (see http://opensource.adobe.com) that already has some pretty exciting projects as part of it and is sure to see even more in the future. This is great news for the open source Flash community. With Adobe’s dedication to opening up its platform and more and more users becoming involved in open source projects, the future looks pretty rosy for open source Flash development. There hasn’t been a better time than now to dive in. |
