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

Creating necessary project files


Let's make a fresh start by creating a new directory on your disk. In this directory, we will keep all the files related to the current chapter's mini project.

Creating a local copy of the Apache Thrift libraries

To make things simpler, we will make a local copy of the Apache Thrift libraries.

Copy the archive that you downloaded in the previous chapter to your newly-created directory and decompress it:

$ tar -xvzf thrift-0.9.2.tar.gz

Note

Note for Windows users

In the examples, we will use Unix-style commands as this is the most popular platform for Apache Thrift. Use Windows equivalents when needed.

To decompress the .tar.gz archives under Windows, I recommend suitable open source (free) software, for example, 7-Zip, which you can download from http://www.7-zip.org/.

Now we will have full Apache Thrift in the thrift-0.9.2 directory (the name may differ depending on the version; substitute it in all the commands). We will be using PHP and Python libraries that...