Facebook Translator Available As Open Source Code
17 Jul 2008 - 09:42:03

By Charles Babcock Fri Jul 11, 9:20 AM ET One of the secrets of 's successful operation for millions of visitors a day is an in-house code translator that lets a system developed in one language talk to a system developed in another -- typically a major stumbling block, or at least performance degrader, on many sites. This translator, dubbed Thrift, helps keep Facebook's many moving parts working together and keeps both inside and outside developers producing new Facebook applications in the language that is best for the task, another gain for the site. A year ago, Facebook announced it was making its Thrift translator code and establishing a project around it. Continued work on Thrift by Facebook developers and developers at firms outside of Facebook prompted the Apache Foundation last month to take Thrift in as an incubator project, a preliminary step often to becoming a fully fledged, Apache project. Thrift was needed in part because Facebook has a culture of letting the engineers choose the best tool for the job, rather than restricting developers to a handful of possibilities, said Aditya Agrawal, director of engineering and co-author of paper on Thrift with technical leads Mark Slee and Marc Kwiatkowski. Thrift doesn't translate everything from one language to another, the way a U.N. translater conveys a Russian speech into English. Rather, it is making sure the data type of one language can be translated into that of another, and it's providing a of rem...

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