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

Analyzing the code


Before we go further, let's have a quick look and explain the most important parts of the code that we used in this chapter. We will dig deeper into the technical details and deal with many useful Apache Thrift options in Chapter 4, Understanding How Apache Thrift Works.

The service description – IDL

The most important part of the service description begins with the following line:

service MyFirstService {

In this block, there are descriptions of methods exposed by this service. Let's have a look at the first two:

oneway void log(1:string filename),
int multiply(1:int number1, 2:int number2),

The syntax bears a strong resemblance to C++'s (and other popular languages') method definitions. The oneway keyword means that the client only makes a request and won't wait for the result of the log method. This method doesn't provide any return value, which is marked by the void keyword (note that all oneway methods should return void). You may also notice numbered argument notation...