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

Installing Apache Thrift on Windows


Although primarily designed for Unix-compatible systems, Apache Thrift can also be used in the Windows environment. The installation is very easy; it is enough to download the Thrift compiler from the download page, https://thrift.apache.org/download. No installation is needed; you may work directly with the downloaded file. For consistency, I suggest renaming the file that you downloaded (that is, thrift-0.9.2.exe) to just thrift.exe. In order to be able to run this command from any directory on your computer, add this file's location to the PATH environment variable. (It varies from version to version, but in most cases, it may be found if you right-click on My Computer and choose Properties. Then, look for the Advanced panel and the Environment Variables… tab. If in doubt, the solution can be found easily on Google).

If you want to develop applications that use Apache Thrift, you, most likely, will be using Visual Studio and C++ or C# bindings. They...