About The Openlibraries

About Openlibraries

The Openlibraries are a suite of open source libraries focused on providing a cross platform, hardware accelerated multimedia development framework, released under the LGPL. As a open source technology the openlibraries are suited for high growth in a technology sector that is massively divided my different programming api’s

In order to empower users looking at alternative operating systems the openlibraries have been developed from the ground up as a cross platform technology. The openlibraries are built on a plugin based framework for maximum extendability, and support both commercial and non commercial plugins. Implementation wise it makes extensive use of native OS APIs to take native advantage of as much of the underlying features and to keep its distribution size to a minimum.

Overview

The concept was to build a single set of core libraries for 3d, image, audio and video support that was wrapped by a asset system that was easy to use. We started by consolidating all the media and asset management code in Jahshaka into the core libraries to get a idea of what the structure would be like and came up with the following:

Open Source

While the Openlibraries are relatively new technology the architecture that they are based on is over 5 years old - and has been developed under as a Open Source technology from the get-go! The Openlibraries evolved out of the Jahshaka Project over the years and now have matured into their own project with the uniqe goal of building a easy to use, but extremely poweful, cross platform multi-media development library.

You can find us at sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openlibraries/

History

During the development of jahshaka as a cross platform digital content creation tool we hit many technology roadblocks along the way and it was rapidly proving to be too difficult to build a multimedia application without a solid multimedia framework to fuel it.

Intrinsic differences between media support on windows, linx and the mac as well as the differences in libraries used for 3d acceleration, image support, and image handling made it impossible to maintain 1 codebase.

Jahshaka development was being significantly imparied as a result of trying to maintain a cross-platform application when the underlying technologies were so different. And so the openlibraries were born!

This architecture made sense and we tried it out in jahshaka 2.0 RC1 where it worked smoothly and was easily extendable. But we quickly realized that the legacy code that was born in jahshaka over the years need replacing and so we set out to rebuild the OpenLibraries project from the ground up.

And so Openlibraries.org was born! The code here is being re-built from the ground up based on the latest programming techniques and using the latest technologies. It will take some time since we are dedicated to maintianing its cross platform nature.