Foursquare Releases Open Source ToolsFoursquare Releases Open Source Tools

Inside Joomla 1.6: Improved Access Control, Categories

Foursquare on Monday released two open source development tools on GitHub.

The popular location service posted the code for Rogue, a MongoDB query domain-specific language (DSL) written in Scala, said company co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, in a tweet. Almost simultaneously, Foursquare released Fully-Loaded, a caching image loader for iOS, he tweeted.

"I love when we push code out open-source," he wrote.

On GitHub, Fully-Loaded is described as "a highly opinionated image loader and cache optimized for UITableView scrolling performance." For its part, Rogue is a type-safe internal Scala DSL for building and executing find-and-modify commands against MongoDB in the Lift Web framework, according to Foursquare.

"It is fully expressive with respect to the basic options provided by MongoDB's native query language, but in a type-safe manner, building on the record types specified in your Lift models," the tool's description said.

Rogue was initially developed by Foursquare Labs for internal use, and almost all the MongoDB queries in Foursquare's code base go through this library, the company said. Currently, Jason Liszka and Jorge Ortiz of Foursquare maintain the software, although the developer welcomes contributions, it said.

In the past, Foursquare has shared other code via GitHub. In January, the location service developer released a CFNetwork wrapper for HTTP requests, Objective-C, Mac OS X, and iPhone, and in 2010 Foursquare posted both a WebOS app for Palm's Pre and Pixi and an Adobe AIR desktop client for Foursquare, according to its GitHub profile. Foursquare joined GitHub in April 2009.