Today we’ve published the RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) specification as part of the Open Screen Project so that anyone can download it and add RTMP functionality to their applications or code. We announced that we were going to be opening it up earlier this year and now it’s available. RTMP is one of the core (and probably most interesting) parts of the Flash Player. It’s what enables a lot of the rich media as well as real time collaboration features inside that have made the Flash Platform so successful. By publishing this spec we’re giving every developer access to the protocol and the ability to implement it however they see fit. My hope is that we’ll see the same explosion we saw with AMF where we have a number of different projects and implementations for many languages.
Kevin Towes has a great writeup on the changes. The important part for developers:
The specification documents how the RTMP protocol works, this will enable you to send and receive data from Flash Player or AIR. You can learn how to use the RTMP handshake, understand how the RTMP Chunk stream is formed, how RTMP command messages are created and the message formats. This information will let you leverage the client side ActionScript classes, NetConnection , NetStream, SharedObject and others that today move data back and forth between Flash Player and Flash Media Server.
There are a couple of things that aren’t included in the spec. As most of you may know, we’ve been evolving both Flash Media Server and RMTP over the past couple of years and have created specific protocols based on it to enable our partners to do things like protect digital content. Those include, for example, RTMPe for encrypting RTMP streams and RTMFP (the real time media flow protocol) for doing P2P communication between Flash Players.
While it took us longer than I would have liked, this is still very significant for our developer community and the wider Flash ecosystem. With the AMF, FLV, F4V and RTMP specifications now open developers have a published set of rules that will let them better integrate SWF applications into their backend systems and architecture. These two specs are the keys to communicating with the Flash Player and I hope this shows that we continue to try to make the Flash Player as transparent as possible even if we aren’t open sourcing it. It’s also important to note that you’re allowed to expand on the RTMP spec and create unique implementations for your own needs.
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