In this report, we present a new software project intended to provide a platform for daptive finite element computation in both research and education. The software DOLFIN is implemented in C++ and provides an object-oriented powerful and flexible environment in which finnite element methods for differential equations can be easily implemented. The current version of DOLFIN already includes a nnumber of modules for special differential equations, including the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. DOLFIN is free and open source, which we believe is a key point in creating truly useful software.