Twitter opens open source page

The Twitter microblogging service has created a Twitter loves open source page, listing the projects it has released or contributed to. The page lists programs written in Ruby, Scala, Java and C/C++ and some tools.

On the new page Ruby developers will find gems for clients to Cassandra, Kestrel message queues and Thrift, text processing for Tweets, interfaces to Zookeepers distributed lock server, cache libraries and a simple UUID generator.

Scala developers will find the Kestrel message queue server, a reverse caching HTTP proxy, data structure implementations, JSON toolkits and Querulous, a Scala library for talking to JDBC databases.

The Java list is predominantly of contributions to the Cassandra distributed database, Hadoop and Pig along with Twitter projects such as Tweet text processing routines. Contributions to Scribe and Ree (Ruby Enterprise Edition), and a memcache based IP blocklist for Apache make up the C/C++ section.

The publication of the Twitter open source page does provide some insight into how the microblogging service constructs its internal systems, but as the actual Twitter service is closed source, it is not enough to construct your own microblogging service. If you want to do that, Status.net offer the AGPL licensed source for the service which powers Identi.ca.

(djwm)