Web Page: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User:GSoC#GSoC_2010_Ideas
Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/gsoc-fb
From the day that Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 to today, the site has been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Today Facebook reaches over 400 million people per month, is the largest PHP site in the World, and has released major pieces of our infrastructure as open source. It's not possible to scale a site like Facebook simply by sharding your databases, rather we've developed and contributed to a series of open source infrastructure technologies. Some of these projects include Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, and Scribe, where each focuses on solving a specific problem.
Projects
- Eliminating Tornado's Dependency on libcurl The goal of this project is to eliminate Tornado's dependency on libcurl which is the biggest source of installation and platform incompatibility issues in Tornado. By removing the libcurl dependency, we can have a cleaner and more compact version of the Tornado Web Server.
- HTML5 support for XHP The aim of this proposal is to give the freedom to XHP developers to develop in HTML5 without waiting the browsers to support it. This will be done by implementing the HTML5 syntax in XHP and rendering it to HTML/CSS/JS that will be behaving similarly and be compatible with all the major browsers.
- iPad support for Three20 framework This proposal is intended to add iPad support to current three20 framework and make three20 full compatible with iPad. The contributor is going to take three steps to accomplish the goal. The first goal is to clean the dirty codes on Three20 project. The second goal is to add more iPad support to Three20 frameworks. The third goal is to modify the current Three20 sample applications to become universal ones.
- Proposal to Facebook HipHop-PHP GSoC Project HipHop for PHP is a compiler developed by Facebook that turns PHP into highly optimised C++ code. It serves 90% traffic of Facebook and have helped reducing CPU usage by averagely fifty percent [1]. The source code of HipHop for PHP was released on February 2010. However, it needs several improvements such 32-bit support, integration of more PHP modules and a better build mechanism. The goal of this GSoC project is to solve these problems to make it a better tool for the Open Source community.
- Snapshot of HBase table Snapshot of HBase table is useful in production. Although data stored on Hadoop has replicas to protect from failed servers, this does not prevent use from software bugs or misoperations that might delete or alter data in ways we did not plan. To create a snapshot, two problems should be taken into account: snapshot request should be returned as soon as possible and snapshot must have a low impact on the cluster. This proposal provides a preliminary design of snapshot implementation on HBase.
- Various Improvements over Scribe This Project adds new features and takes care of several problems that currently exists in scribe.