Behind the Scenes: August 2007 Archives

As you know by now, Hi5 supports widgets from Slide and Rock You.  To accomplish this integration we wrote a completely new software platform.  The end result is http://api.hi5.com/.  The software that makes it possible is called Enunciate.

Enunciate is an open-source toolkit that generates a complete interoperable system for providing Web Services.  It does this by allowing you to place metadata and documentation about your desired services directly in your code. Invoking the enunciate compiler generates a complete web site with documentation, server endpoints, and client libraries.

We're using the following features now:

• REST endpoints for Widgets, Feeds, and Authentication.
  
• SOAP support, including generated SOAP client libraries.
• JSON output support.
• Full documentation coming direct from the code.

Hi5 sponsored much of the work for Enunciate 1.3 and will continue to work with the primary author and community to improve and extend the Enunciate code.  The roadmap has a number of exciting features that you will soon see on the Hi5 API server.

We welcome you to participate in the future of Hi5 API development.  You can join our new Hi5 API group where you can ask questions and keep abreast of the latest news.

Another LinuxWorld conference has come and gone.  Many people from Hi5 attended, which just goes to show how important Linux and other Open Source products are for our business.

Hi5's success is based in large part on these high quality open source products.  Our entire site runs using open source software on a Linux platform.  We've found that this provides us with unparalleled flexibility, performance and low costs.

To make Hi5 run we use all of the following products:

• Linux Servers running SuSE Enterprise Linux
• Apache and Lighttpd web servers
• PostgreSQL, a highly scalable database
• Squid for web acceleration
• Resin and Tomcat Java Application Servers
• Struts, our MVC platform
• iBatis - for Object Relational Mapping
  
• Spring - Java Application Framework
  
• Memcached, where we cache as much as possible.
  
• Lucene indexing and search engine
• Enunciate web service deployment framework
  

In addition to being users of these products Hi5 has been more and more active in the community efforts surrounding these Open Source projects.   We've moved beyond mailing list activity and bug reports to actively  contributing code and sponsoring development work.  You can expect more and more of this in the future.

It's all very exciting!  If working with open source projects is your thing then you should definitely check out our careers page.  We'll be talking more about our open source contributions in the months to come, so stay tuned to our blog.

Paul

Update: Lou tells me that we have a few more obscure software components that we enjoy using:

• SiteMesh - Web Page Layout and Decoration Framework.
• StringTemplate - Simple templating engine.
• JRobin - RRDtool for Java
• ImageJ - Image Manipulation toolkit