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

Further testing and other exercises


In our examples, we tried to submit some valid and invalid data to see how the service performs and if we are able to handle the errors properly. We didn't, however, test every possible scenario.

As an extra exercise, I suggest that you attempt the following tasks:

  • Testing each of the functions in the Ruby client with both valid and invalid arguments

  • Testing border cases and different combinations of valid and invalid parameters

  • Writing automatic unit tests for the methods implemented in the server

  • Experimenting with different transports, protocols, and servers

  • Adding client and server code as a module to bigger applications, for example, written in some framework

  • Running performance tests and comparing response times under different conditions

I hope that this (incomplete) list of possible solutions will inspire you to expand your Apache Thrift experience further beyond the basics covered in this book.