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 type system


Apache Thrift offers its own type system, which is designed to allow the developers to use the variable types native to their language of choice. Then, Thrift's libraries take care of translating the types between different languages.

Apache Thrift creators divided its types into a few categories:

  • Basic: These are the simplest types present in virtually every programming language.

  • Special: These are those which don't fit into the basic category (currently, it is only one type).

  • Structs: These are the equivalent of structs or classes from popular programming languages (with some limitations).

  • Container: These are equivalent to commonly used container types in most of the programming languages.

  • Exceptions: These are used to handle the errors.

  • Services: These are core concept in Apache Thrift. They gather all the other types mentioned earlier to describe the procedures that can be called remotely. Exposing services is the main purpose of Apache Thrift.

IDL is a way of defining...