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

Apache Thrift's architecture


Apache Thrift's architecture can be viewed from two angles. The first approach shows the tool that is used by the developer—the Thrift compiler—along with the set of instructions that determine what to do in order to run the services.

The second way is to get to know the internal architecture and the purpose of protocols, transports, services, and processors that the developer will use, in order to know how the tools are built and what are the ways of their operation.

As in every craft, you can build things knowing the basic operation of the tool that you will work with; not every developer needs to have a deep knowledge of Apache Thrift's internals to do his job. However, to fully understand how it works and design the scalable and performant services and system architectures, this knowledge is essential.

If you wish to get the information about Apache Thrift IDL syntax and start preparing your services right away without getting too much into the technical details...