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 document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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