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

Real-world examples of the usage of Apache Thrift


Up to this point, you learned lots of theoretical details about Apache Thrift and did the development on your own. You know its capabilities and limitations, and I hope you know that it is a great tool to use with many applications. However, is this tool really something that is used in real life?

In this section, I will show you how some well-known, worldwide companies that use Apache Thrift in their operations. You will learn about how it is applied in Facebook, Evernote, Twitter, and some other popular services.

FBThrift in Facebook

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) is a company that needs no introduction. With 1.49 billion active users every month, it is used by roughly 20% of the Earth's population. As you know from Chapter 1, Introducing Apache Thrift, Facebook engineers are the original authors of the framework. They developed it in 2006 and used it as an internal tool to provide application intercommunication. A year later, they decided...