Facebook’s React Native, a framework for building native apps using React, its open-source JavaScript library that provides a view for data rendered as HTML, has risen to become the social media giant’s second most popular open-source project just nine months after its launch.

The revelation was made by Christine Abernathy, Developer Advocate for the Open Source Team at Facebook, in a blog post looking at the success of Facebook’s open-source projects in 2015.

React and React Native were without doubt Facebook’s runaway successes in open-source this year, seeing widespread adoption with the likes of Netflix Inc. and WordPress both revamping their products with the React code. Indeed, React, along with the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) project, became Facebook’s first projects to hit 10,000 stars, and were quickly followed by React Native, Pop and Immutable.js. React went on to hit a milestone for Facebook by hitting 33,000 stars by the end of the year, while React Native’s unprecedented growth saw it gain 24,000 stars and pick up more than 4,000 commits from 400+ contributors in just nine months. Altogether, Facebook’s open source program generated more than 3,400 developer contributions in the last year, the majority of which were external.

• React: 33K stars
• React Native: 24K stars
• Pop: 13.5K stars
• HHVM: 13K stars
• Immutable.js: 10K stars

Other projects saw increased adoption too. Abernathy notes that the handmade goods marketplace Etsy.com migrated to HHVM in 2015, while Box said it was adopting the virtual machine technology as the exclusive serving engine for its PHP codebase. Abernathy also revealed that Facebook’s Presto interactive querying engine has been adopted by companies including Airbnb Inc., Dropbox Inc., Netflix, Gree International Inc., a Japanese social media game developer, and JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce site.

Abernathy also highlighted Relay, a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications, and GraphQL, a data query language, as other open-source projects that have seen considerable growth in the past year. Altogether, Facebook launched 125 new open-source projects in 2015, growing the number of Facebook-led production projects by more than fifty percent.

Image credit: Alexas_Fotos via pixabay.com