Facebook has been a good open source citizen, sharing significant improvements to memcached. Now it releases the homegrown software framework Thrift:

Thrift

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.

Release 20070401
Source, .tar.gz format

Thrift is released under the Thrift Software License.
Overview

Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler generates code that can be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly across programming languages.

Besides downloading the source code, there are two easy ways to learn more about Thrift:

* Visit the Thrift Developers Group
* Read the Thrift Whitepaper

Thrift is one of Facebook's core software engineering resources. It is used in various ways across many products, including Search, Mobile, Share, Notes, and Platform. If you use the site, you've used Thrift.
Requirements

Thrift has been widely tested and deployed on Facebook's systems. Though the code is designed for portability, we can't guarantee that it'll run on every system. Here are some basic things you'll want to have. (Note that you do not need to have every language package installed if you only intend to use some of them.)

* A relatively POSIX-compliant *NIX system
* GNU build tools (Autoconf 2.59c+)
* boost 1.33.1+
* g++ 4.0+
* Java 1.5+ / Apache Ant
* Python 2.4+
* PHP 5.0+
* Ruby 1.8+

Think this sounds like a fun thing to work on? Submit a patch or join the team.