As children, many of our parents instructed us to play well with others. It not only helped us build relationships, but it also made whatever we were doing better. Facebook has been bullish with its open-source initiatives, because playing well with other developers yields rewards for everyone. Yesterday, Facebook posted its mid-year open-source highlights of 2014. In it the company talks about the 63 new projects it has launched so far this year. All of which can be found on the Facebook, Instagram, and Parse GitHub accounts. In the post the company details activity on its projects: “There have been 13,000 total commits to these repos (up 45% from the second half of 2013), and the overall size of our open source code base (not including forks) has risen 51% to 9.9 million lines of code.”
Facebook loves to share how much it likes open source, and the social network has followed through on that note with a status update on its activities this year. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company highlighted a number of its more popular projects in a blog post on Friday, putting user interface Javascript library React and iOS/OS X animation engine Pop in the spotlight. The latter has played a large role in a pair of other Facebook projects with which end users might be more familiar. That would be the first two projects rolled out from Facebook’s Creative Labs department: digital news reader app Paper and Snapchat-competitor Slingshot. Facebook engineers revealed Pop “spawned a host of extensions and integrations, including the iOS version of our very own Slingshot.” Pop has also grown to become Facebook’s second most popular open source project ever. Looking forward, Facebook is following through on some of the products it unveiled to developers at F8 in San Francisco back in April. One product making its way out the door today in beta access is Display Node, Facebook’s open source asynchronous UI framework.
