Thrift, the protocol put out by Facebook actually has a module for PHP. While working on code for Social OS which uses Thrift extensively, I ran into a little problem because the extension seems to compile but it fails to load. The problem may be specific to Ubuntu 7.10 or 8.04, or other Linux distros. The reason for this is the configure script somehow ends up using gcc to compile something that should be compiled with g++. To fix this in a hackish way I changed the references to gcc to g++ in Makefile. This basically solved the problem and now the extension loads without a hitch.