Facebook Likes Google Summer of Code

This summer Facebook participated in Google Summer of Code for the first time and we want to share an update on the progress our students made. Unlike most organizations participating in the program, we have a number of open source projects rather than just a single project. This meant that we accepted a few students to work across open source projects which we actively contribute to in addition to projects that we've released.

We received many applications from students all over the world who were excited to spend their summer working on adding new features to HBase, HipHop for PHP, Scribe, Three20 and XHP. While some projects are still working on merging their changes, by the end of the summer:

• Chongxin Li designed and coded some initial support for snapshotting in Apache HBase that will allow for easier recovery from data loss.

• Hui Chen ported HipHop for PHP to 32-bit operating systems, implemented some missing extensions, and helped improve the stability of the project. All of these changes are already in the core and some are running on the very web servers you're using right now.

• Souvik Roy added regular expression support to Scribe for category names and implemented some unit tests into the existing system which makes future development easier.

• Chih-Wei Lee spent his time working on adding iPad support to Three20, the UI library we released which is used by many iPhone applications. Some of this support has been merged into trunk and the rest is being reviewed.

• Avgoustinos Kadis added support for new HTML5 elements to XHP. This allows PHP developers to write their HTML once and have XHP handle gracefully degradation from native HTML5 elements to JavaScript implementations in older browsers. (We wrote about how we’re using HTML5 two weeks ago.)

As part of Google Summer of Code, both the students and mentoring projects receive a stipend, and we asked that what would be given to Facebook is donated to the Apache Software Foundation instead. We really enjoyed having the opportunity to take part in Google Summer of Code and want to thank these five students for their awesome work!

By Scott MacVicar, Facebook mentor for Google Summer of Code

This post is cross posted from Facebook’s Engineering Notes