On the heel’s of Facebook’s announcement of HipHop for PHP — their “source code transformer” of the PHP scripting language which many Facebook applications are built upon — comes XHP, an extension to inline XML. The full impact of using XHP is still to be determined, Facebook’s Marcel Laverdet says that this makes “front-end code easier to understand” and helps “avoid cross-site scripting attacks.”
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After ongoing rumors of a new version of PHP being released by Facebook today, the company has officially announced HipHop for PHP: a source code transformer. For those who suggested that it was a new compiler, it isn’t exactly that. And no, Facebook has not rewritten PHP all together. While I don’t understand much about the technicalities behind compilers, Haiping Zhao has posted complete details about the project.
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Prior to the recent homepage change, many developers were loving a massive unfiltered distribution channel of application updates: the Facebook stream. Since the redesign that has all changed, and today Facebook is making one other change to the stream. Previously, feed stories from applications could display multiple images. As of today, multiple images can still be displayed, however the default display will only show one image and require the user to click “See More” to see the full feed story.
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While there have been a number of .NET libraries for the Facebook Platform for some time now, today Microsoft is releasing the official Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform. There are a number of core benefits to this upgrade including the ability to easily view native Facebook Platform methods within the Microsoft Development environment with intellisense. While Microsoft previously demoed applications build using the Facebook library within Microsoft applications, this is the first official rollout of the libraries.
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Last night Facebook announced that a new version of Adobe’s ActionScript library for the Facebook Platform was released. For those developers building robust flash applications, this new library will most definitely be a welcomed upgrade. According to Justin Bishop, the new library provides “support for translations and the latest Facebook Platform APIs, like fql.multiQuery, the Comments API, and Inbox API.”
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When Facebook released their Social Analytics service last week I was extremely enthusiastic. It’s a huge move by Facebook to open up data about how many users are sharing, commenting on, liking, and clicking URLs on the site. I still am extremely enthusiastic, however today I realized a huge flaw in the system: short URLs.
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Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new tool for developers to enable them to test new implementations of Facebook Connect and to ensure that the service is always running. The tool leverages Waitr, an open-sourced Ruby library for automating internet browsers. It will automatically run browsers for you and provides an interface for quickly navigating and interacting with a web page’s various components. The point is to ensure that Facebook Connect is always working.
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In his first Facebook blog post today, David Recordon has announced the open sourcing of Tornado, FriendFeed’s real-time web services technology. As described by Recordon, Tornado is a “non-blocking Web server framework written in Python”. In addition to open sourcing many of their other technologies, Facebook is continuing to support the open source movement by providing more libraries for developers.
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Some time ago I had the good fortune to work with some developers on a Facebook application that was underperforming. Through a very robust investigation of the application, it was discovered that a large number of invalid requests were being passed to the server. It was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack utilizing Facebook platform and a popular application to bring down the application.
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If you’re a developer you’ll know that one of the most important things to making efficient code is to reduce your code’s dependency on SQL queries. Rather than running 1,000 SQL “INSERT” queries for 1,000 individual items for example, it’s better to batch those items into a single “INSERT” statement. There are other methods that can be used to improve query performance as well including general query batching in which multiple queries are batched into a single request.
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