Book Image

Learning Apache Thrift

Book Image

Learning Apache Thrift

Overview of this book

With modern software systems being increasingly complex, providing a scalable communication architecture for applications in different languages is tedious. The Apache Thrift framework is the solution to this problem! It helps build efficient and easy-to-maintain services and offers a plethora of options matching your application type by supporting several popular programming languages, including C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml, and Delphi. This book will help you set aside the basics of service-oriented systems through your first Apache Thrift-powered app. Then, progressing to more complex examples, it will provide you with tips for running large-scale applications in production environments. You will learn how to assess when Apache Thrift is the best tool to be used. To start with, you will run a simple example application, learning the framework's structure along the way; you will quickly advance to more complex systems that will help you solve various real-life problems. Moreover, you will be able to add a communication layer to every application written in one of the popular programming languages, with support for various data types and error handling. Further, you will learn how pre-eminent companies use Apache Thrift in their popular applications. This book is a great starting point if you want to use one of the best tools available to develop cross-language applications in service-oriented architectures.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning Apache Thrift
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
5
Generating and Running Code in Different Languages
Index

Preparing the Apache Thrift document


Apache Thrift allows us to have a more complicated structure of the documents than a single file. It is especially useful if you want to have a set of basic tools to include in different services.

In our simple example, let's say we want to have a basic service, which allows logging messages to file. Any other service that we build has to have this capability. We also want some basic exceptions defined that are universal and can be used in any service, regardless of its specifics.

Therefore, we will split our definition into two Apache Thrift documents:

  • mybase.thrift will contain basic universal components

  • mytoolbox.thrift will contain our specific service

Note

You can type the files as we go or download them from Packt's website.

The basic toolbox – base.thrift

Let's identify the components that are universal, and we can use them not only in our MyToolbox service, but also in any other service in the future.

For sure, the save_to_log function is universal and...