The Facebook Blog

The PHP programming language has solidified itself as the language of choice for many top internet properties, including Facebook. PHP is easy to use and integrates well with Apache, Memcache, and MySQL. Despite its suitability for web development and scripting, PHP is generally not the best choice for standalone software or servers. C++, on the other hand, is well suited for building both online and offline services.

Unfortunately, if the new services operates with data managed by the existing PHP code base it can be dangerous to use a... separate data access pattern. If the cache keys or database schema were to change in the PHP code base then the service would be broken (and potentially corrupting data for the PHP code base) until the code was updated and the program recompiled and restarted.

Faced with this problem we decided to embed the PHP Interpreter into C++ binaries. This isn't a novel endeavor by any means; Apache uses the PHP Server API (SAPI) to accomplish exactly that. However, when we began attempting integration of our own we found that the SAPI required quite a bit of expertise to manipulate effectively.

In order to make embedding PHP truly simple for all of our developers we developed the PHPEmbed library which is just a more accessible and simplified API built on top of the PHP SAPI. The library is so useful, we decided to share it with the world. Check it out for yourself at http://developers.facebook.com/phpembed/



Boz is a software engineer at Facebook and, like PHPEmbed, he is open source

Is there a little bit of competition between Toronto and London? Back in May, Nico wrote about the apparent Canadian love for Facebook (and how much we loved them back). A few weeks later, London picked up in a big way, and surpassed Toronto to become the largest network on the site.

Whether it's international competition or mere coincidence, we're overjoyed. We're so excited, in fact, that we're going to be opening an office in London as thanks to our dedicated users. We also want to support the growing demand for advertising on the site by UK advertisers.

The UK is also growing on a national scale; in terms of unique users, it's currently the third biggest country on Facebook (coming in just behind Canada) and it is the fastest growing international market we have. The UK also contributed over 5.5 billion page views in the month of August, which means everyone out there saw an average of 1,100 Facebook pages. That means you'll probably look at 35 Facebook pages today, and this blog post is already 1/35 of your daily dose. Hopefully you'll enjoy the other 34 pages as much as this one.

We saw approximately 5 million UK users (blue) visit us last month, and it's catching up to Canada (yellow). Keep an eye out for Australia (pink), the dark horse contender - we're picking up down under, too.

Natalie Minor, soon to be in the London office, is hoping you appreciate how much the growth charts resemble the Tube map.

Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users' individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.

As always, if you do not want your public search listing to be visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can control that from the Search Privacy page. Please note that you will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to "Everyone".
Phil Fung, a Facebook engineer, has found what he was looking for.