Over the past twelve months or so, we’ve seen a gradual movement of DeveloperForce open source projects to GitHub, mirroring the wider community. The combination of git‘s straightforward distributed source control [1] with GitHub’s effortless project forking model has led to a whole slew of contributions over the past few weeks and months. Since I oversee the Force.com Toolkit for PHP and the Force.com JavaScript REST Toolkit, I thought I’d offer kudos to some of our recent contributors.

On the PHP side, Jeremiah Johnson has added parsing for search() results, making them consistent with query() results, while David de Boer fixed some warnings when running under PHP’s STRICT message level. Over on the JavaScript REST Toolkit, the enigmatically-named Shedal has been hard at work allowing REST API calls to be synchronous and fixing problems relating to caching in Internet Explorer. Many thanks to Jeremiah, David and Shedal!

An interesting observation is that, although the number of lines per contribution for this set ranges from two to twenty five, with three commits being on the lower end of that scale [2], each commit smooths off some rough edge. If you’ve forked a DeveloperForce project and tweaked it to fix some corner case, send us a pull request, even if it is only a couple of lines. Every little helps!

[1] If you’re disagreeing with my characterization of git as ‘straightforward’ then watch the excellent Git for Ages 4 and Up and all will be made plain.

[2] Of course, lines of code is no indication of the quality of a contribution, or the effort that went into creating it – it can take many hours of painstaking work to narrow down a change to the right two lines!