Facebook Open Sources Its Proxygen HTTP Framework And Server

Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Proxygen, the C++ HTTP libraries — including an HTTP server — that it uses internally. The company has open-sourced quite a bit of its code in recent months, much of it focused on mobile developers. In many ways, today’s launch is more interesting, though, as it’s likely to reach a far wider number of developers.

From the get-go, Facebook notes that it isn’t trying to replace popular HTTP and proxy servers like Apache or nginx with Proxygen. “Those projects focus on building extremely flexible HTTP servers written in C that offer good performance but almost overwhelming amounts of configurability,” Facebook engineers Daniel Sommermann and Alan Frindell write in today’s announcement. “Instead, we focused on building a high performance C++ HTTP framework with sensible defaults that includes both server and client code and that’s easy to integrate into existing applications.”

Still, the framework allows you to quickly set up an event-driven server that can handle HTTP and SPDY requests. Chances are that other projects will look at this and use it as the basis to build their own web servers on top of this codebase.

Proxygen evolved from an earlier project in 2011 that aimed to write a customizable reverse-proxy load balancer, Sommermann and Frindell say.

While Facebook could have gone with Apache, nginx or Varnish as its HTTP stack, the engineers argue that building their own framework allowed the company to integrate more deeply with Facebook’s existing infrastructure and tools like the company’s version of Apache Thrift (which is also now available on GitHub).

Given Facebook’s size, the team was also looking for a solution that could scale beyond existing solutions, and the company wanted to be able to reuse the framework in other tools. Haystack, HHVM and Facebook’s load balancers also use Proxygen in some form or another, for example, as does the company’s mobile infrastructure.

By now Proxygen has handled “many trillions of HTTP(S) and SPDY requests,” so this is definitely some pretty battle-hardened code by now. You can find the source code here and a more in-depth description of how Proxygen works here.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

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Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Kiran Upadhyay

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