Building fb mobile
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This document summarizes a presentation about building Facebook's native mobile apps. It discusses: 1. The history of moving from a HTML/web-based mobile app to native iOS and Android apps in order to improve performance and the user experience. 2. The organizational structure that was developed, including product teams, a core team, and a release team to coordinate updates across many apps. 3. The development processes used, including source control with Git, code review with Phabricator, continuous integration with Buildbot, and a focus on unit testing with tools like xctool and Buck.
![Build Rule
android_library(
name = 'ui',
srcs = glob(['**/*.java']),
deps = [
'//android_res/com/facebook/share:res',
'//java/com/facebook/base:base',
'//third-party/java/guava:guava',
],
visibility = [ 'PUBLIC' ],
)
Tuesday, May 7, 13](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/buildingfbmobile-130527062435-phpapp02/85/Building-fb-mobile-44-320.jpg)
Building fb mobile
- 1. developers Prashant Sridharan and Bear Douglas github/coolasspuppy github/beardouglas @coolasspuppy @beardigsit Building Facebooks Native Apps Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 2. Agenda Over the wall: some history Product Teams and the Core Team Scheduling and Stabilizing Releases How We Develop Eating the Dogfood: Builds A Culture of Unit Testing Future of iOS at Facebook Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 3. History Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 4. Facebook for Mobile Web deeply engrained in Facebooks DNA Use HTML5/Javascript within wrapper native app Developed our own framework for advanced integration (image uploads, photo browsers, mixing native/web elements) Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 5. HTML as an app platform What does it bring us? One CodebaseInstant Updates A/B Testing Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 6. HTML as an app platform Frequent performance problems No coherent multithreading strategy in web apps DOM manipulations and layout can spin out of control, lots of hacks Dif鍖cult memory management (<img>) Debugging and getting stack traces are extremely dif鍖cult Limited animations and effects Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 7. A few good engineers Facebook for iOS 5.0 began as an experiment Could we achieve better results with native code? High barrier: rewrite all of Facebooks mobile UI! Couldnt disrupt company Move this to a war room! Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 8. Winding Road Lots of changes along the way: Led to a rethink about how our APIs fetch data Experimented with advanced rendering to make feed smooth Sprinkle in some design changes Plenty of wrangling with Core Data and Core Animation Shipped internally starting in mid-2012 Reaction: we liked it Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 9. Reaction Press loved it More importantly Perceived Speed way up User Ratings way up 2x Speed increase! Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 10. Team Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 11. Scaling it Up We got it out the door, but A few iOS engineers in a room wont cut it Making Facebook a mobile 鍖rst company Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 12. Wake-up Call News Feed team invented phenomenal new story type but they werent thinking about 5.0 and we didnt know about News Feed developments Mad dash to port the story type to native code before 5.0 Not an experience we wanted to repeat! Lots of cooperation required to keep abreast of product developments: news feed, timeline, comments, photos, pages, places, events, Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 13. Prioritization and resources Every product wanted their features in the new native app Overwhelmed by prioritizing so many requests iOS Team still had very limited resources Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 14. A multi-app ecosystem Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 15. The Team Sandwich Release Team: Release & Stabilization ProcessRelease Team: Release & Stabilization ProcessRelease Team: Release & Stabilization ProcessRelease Team: Release & Stabilization ProcessRelease Team: Release & Stabilization Process Photos Feed Search Places Messages Core Team: Shared LibrariesCore Team: Shared LibrariesCore Team: Shared Libraries Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 16. Core Team: support and assist Build core, shared libraries Infrastructure and integration Keep the app fast and clean Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 17. Product Cycle Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 18. Timing Releases Simple model: Release X will have features A, B, C Next release at mercy of the slowest product team No choice but to wait until its done This slowed us down, and we want to move fast Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 19. Fixed Release Cycle Ship an update every x weeks no matter what At Facebook we target a release every 4 weeks (approximately) Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 20. Building features with an off switch Every feature must be built with a way to turn it off If a feature destabilizes the build or isnt complete, turn it off and try again next time #defines or runtime switches (preferred) Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 21. Road to a new Like Bar Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 22. Development Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 23. Process Engineers make changes locally Submit changes for review Changes are automatically checked for build and unit test failures Team members review & suggest changes Once approved, submit to master Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 24. Source Control: Git Distributed development Designed for speed Open source Optimized for non-linear development Allows local branching Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 26. Arcanist The command line counterpart to Phabricator arc lint Checks for common errors: Null pointers Syntax errors and style guideline violations Using APIs unavailable in all supported Android versions arc land Pushes code into the tree Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 27. Buildbot Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 28. Builds Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 29. Downloading builds Deployed to entire company Signed with Enterprise Distribution pro鍖le Daily builds posted to internal web site Installed directly on device Use different Bundle IDs for different builds Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 30. Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 31. Rage Shake Take out your stress on the device Captures: Screen shot (with annotations!) Network logs Last crash log Last x-seconds of logging Dumps the view hierarchy Automatically 鍖les a bug and sends it to Facebook Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 32. Branching Two concurrent branches: Master Engineers make progress on future features All changes checked in here 鍖rst including bug 鍖xes for Releases Release Once veri鍖ed in Master Release team pulls them into Release branch Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 33. Testing Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 34. Testing is important to Facebook Not in Facebooks culture: SDEs in Test Large QA departments De鍖nitely in Facebook culture: High quality, reliable user experience We believe in developer-authored unit tests Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 36. Unit Testing on iOS Some built-in Xcode support: OCMock & SenTestingKit Uses dynamic nature of Objective-C Easy to set-up, and well documented BUT Many iOS engineers unfamiliar with testing Frameworks are immature Incomplete support in xcodebuild Doesnt understand Test action in your Schemes Cant run tests that require Simulator Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 37. xctool Replacement for xcodebuild Runs Simulator tests Structured output Phabricator support built-in Customizable to other build systems Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 38. Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 39. Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 41. We needed a better tool Minimal overhead in creating a module Keep boilerplate out of the codebase IDE friendly Faster clean builds Faster incremental builds Support ad-hoc build steps Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 42. Buck: an Android build system build rule procedure for producing output 鍖les from input 鍖les build 鍖le 鍖le (named BUCK) where build rules are declared build target string identi鍖er for a build rule Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 43. Build Target //java/com/facebook/share:ui Root of the repository Directory where the build 鍖le can be found Name of the build rule Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 44. Build Rule android_library( name = 'ui', srcs = glob(['**/*.java']), deps = [ '//android_res/com/facebook/share:res', '//java/com/facebook/base:base', '//third-party/java/guava:guava', ], visibility = [ 'PUBLIC' ], ) Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 45. Build File: Rules and Macros Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 46. Dependency Graph AR AR AR AL AL AL AL AL AL AB GR AB GR Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 47. Dependency Graph AR AR AR AL AL AL AL AL AL AB GR AB GR Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 48. How does IntelliJ feel about all of this? buck project FTW! Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 49. Focus on Speed Parallel builds Unit tests take 4 minutes instead of 20 by using 8 threads Incremental Only rebuild what is necessary Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 50. Migration: August 2012 Ant Buck 3m40s 1m30s Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 51. http://github.com/facebook/xctool Now open source: xctool and Buck http://github.com/facebook/buck Tuesday, May 7, 13
- 52. Future of Mobile @ Facebook Tuesday, May 7, 13