Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth. An asynchronous messaging solution is becoming a necessity for big web applications, and Starling fits the particular needs we have at Twitter. It’s fast, it’s stable, it speaks the memcache protocol so it doesn’t need a new client library, and it’s disk-backed for persistence. When other parts of the Twitter site go down, Starling stays up. It’s a champ, and we love it.
Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.
Twitter has released part of the code that makes what they do possible. This is well beyond just giving people access to your API. I’ve speculated that Twitter would make a great platform model and maybe this is a step in that direction, or maybe by releasing this the open source community can build on and expand it’s features and everyone wins Whatever the case, this is an interesting move.
Via dev.twitter.com
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Code, Twitter Source, Starling
