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

Chapter 1. Introducing Apache Thrift

There is a milestone in the life of every sufficiently large application that marks the point when it is too big to be maintained as a monolith. For some systems, it is in their blueprints from the very beginning, while for others, it comes as a growth induced necessity and brings along the need for massive rebuild.

Apache Thrift is one of the tools that assist in building scalable, distributed systems, spanning across different platforms and languages. Originally developed for internal use by Facebook, now it is an open source software project backed by the Apache Foundation. It is characterized by a wide range of supported languages, flexibility, and performance.

In this chapter, you will learn about the scenarios where using Apache Thrift may be necessary. You will also get familiar with its basic properties and how it is compared to other similar frameworks. It is essential to know the big picture to be able to select the best tool for your job.

Let's see how you can put Apache Thrift to good use!