The ActionScript Open Source Libraries

Our friends at Adobe recently started hosting their open source projects on Google Code. We wanted to hear a bit more about their experience moving ActionScript 3 libraries over to Google Code, and here is what they had to say:

The ActionScript Open Source libraries are a set of ActionScript 3 libraries created by Adobe that make it easy to work with online APIs in Flash and Flex applications. There are libraries included for Flickr, YouTube , Mappr, as well as a general utility Library (corelib), a unit testing framework (Flex Unit), as well as a complete library for reading RSS and ATOM feeds.

We recently moved these libraries from our own Adobe Labs site to Google Code, and have been very happy with the results thus far. The projects were always intended to be community run projects, but our initial deployment site did not have the infrastructure in place to handle hosting an open source project with multiple developers. As the libraries became more and more popular, and as we continued to get requests from developers to improve and contribute code, we decided that we needed to move to a system that would better allow the developer community to contribute to the projects.

We looked at a number of code repositories, but decided on Google Code because it had all of the features that we wanted (Subversion, Issue Tracking, Downloads, Wiki and Groups), and integrated them in a way we felt was intuitive and straightforward. We did run into some initial problems moving the code from our Subversion repository to Google Code, but with some help from Google, were able to make the transition.

We have already seen more participation from the developer community, and have added new features and fixed some bugs. We expect that the projects will continue to grow as more developers start working with ActionScript, Flash and Flex.

Mike Potter, Adobe