Facebook has long been a big contributor to the open source movement, and releases a number of their in-house projects under open source licenses. They even provide a a mirror for popular open source endeavors, such as Mozilla and Apache. This week Facebook announced the release their first open source JavaScript library.
In September, Facebook released FBJS, which is a layer on top of JavaScript designed specifically for use with the Facebook platform. It lets developers use JavaScript in their Facebook applications, including things like AJAX and DOM manipulation. The problem with FBJS, though, was that it didn’t play nice with outside JavaScript libraries, so for anything that it didn’t support, developers were out of luck.
With that in mind, Facebook decided to internally develop a library for creating JavaScript animations in FBJS. “And then we thought: ‘why stop there?’ The library had very little Facebook-specific code, so we took some time to modularize it, and now we’re open-sourcing it for everyone,” said Facebook developer Marcel Laverdet.
Facebook is following in the steps of rival web giants Google and Yahoo!, who both have open sourced internal JavaScript libraries. While Facebook’s release of the animation library is a far cry from the more complete libraries released by Yahoo! and Google, such as Yahoo!’s YUI or Google’s Web Toolkit, it is a step in that direction. Releasing open source development libraries is a very smart thing to do, because it builds capital with developers and attracts developers to your platform. For Yahoo! and Google, their development libraries help to attract developers to their other APIs (such as Google Maps or Flickr). For Facebook, releasing libraries like Animation could help draw more developers toward their platform.
The Animation library is described as a way for developers to create “customizable animations using CSS and DOM manipulation.” It is released under a modified BSD license.
