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

Implementing the server


Our server will be implemented in the Python language. In this section, we will go through the script line by line, explaining each as we go along; you can type it in the file or download it from the repository.

So, let's open the MyToolboxServer.py file and go through its contents.

Imports

At the beginning, we need to import files that are necessary for the script to run:

import sys, glob
# path for file generated by Apache Thrift Compiler
sys.path.append('gen-py')
# add path where built Apache Thrift libraries are
sys.path.insert(0, glob.glob('thrift-0.9.2/lib/py/build/lib.*')[0])

These are the modules in the gen-py directory and the thrift-0.9.2 directory (the name depends on the exact Apache Thrift version you use).

Note

Remember to build the library by running the following commands:

cd thrift-0.9.2/lib/py
python setup.py build
cd ../../..

Next, we need to import some of the modules and functions that will be used in the implemented service. The first line contains...