Thrift is an interface definition language that is used to define and create services for numerous languages. It is used as a remote procedure call
Remote procedure call
In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...
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for "scalable cross-language services development". It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently to a varying degree and seamlessly between C#, C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
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. Although developed at Facebook, it is now an open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, U.S., in June 1999.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...
. The implementation was described in an April 2007 technical paper released by Facebook, now hosted on Apache. To put it simply, Apache Thrift is a binary communication protocol.
Architecture
Thrift includes a complete stack for creating clients and servers. The top part is generated code from the Thrift definition. The services generate from this file client and processor code. In contrast to build-in types, created data structures are sent as result in generated code. The protocol and transport layer are part of the runtime library. With Thrift, it is possible to define a service and change the protocol and transport without recompiling your code. Besides the client part, Thrift includes a server infrastructures to tie protocols and transports together, like blocking, non-blocking, and multi-threaded servers. The underlying I/O part of the stack is differently implemented for different languages.
Thrift supports a number of protocols:
TBinaryProtocol – A straight-forward binary format encoding numeric values as binary. It is faster than the text protocol but more difficult to debug.
TCompactProtocol – Very efficient, dense encoding of data.
TDebugProtocol – Uses a human-readable text format to aid in debugging.
TDenseProtocol – Similar to TCompactProtocol, striping off the meta information from what is transmitted.
TJSONProtocol – Uses JSON for encoding of data.
TSimpleJSONProtocol – A write-only protocol using JSON. Suitable for parsing by scripting languages.
The supported transports are:
TFileTransport – This transport writes to a file.
TFramedTransport – This transport is required when using a non-blocking server. It sends data in frames, where each frame is preceded by a length information.
TMemoryTransport – Uses memory for I/O. The Java implementation uses a simple ByteArrayOutputStream internally.
TSocket – Uses blocking socket I/O for transport.
TZlibTransport – Performs compression using zlib. Used in conjunction with another transport. Not available in the Java implementation.
Thrift also provides a number of servers, which are
TNonblockingServer – A multi-threaded server using non-blocking io (Java implementation uses NIO channels). TFramedTransport must be used with this server.
TSimpleServer – A single-threaded server using std blocking io. Useful for testing.
TThreadPoolServer – A multi-threaded server using std blocking io.
Benefits
Some stated benefits of Thrift include:
Cross-language serialization with lower overhead than alternatives such as SOAP
SOAP
SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
due to use of binary format
A lean and clean library. No framework to code to. No XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
configuration files.
The language bindings feel natural. For example Java
Java (programming language)
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C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
uses std::vector.
The application-level wire format and the serialization-level wire format are cleanly separated. They can be modified independently.
The predefined serialization styles include: binary, HTTP-friendly and compact binary.
In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored and "resurrected" later in the same or another computer environment...
.
Soft versioning of the protocol. Thrift does not require a centralized and explicit mechanism like major-version/minor-version. Loosely coupled teams can freely evolve RPC calls.
No build dependencies or non-standard software. No mix of incompatible software licenses.
Creating a Thrift service
Thrift is written in C++, but can create code for a number of languages. To create a Thrift service, one has to write Thrift files that describe it, generate the code in the destination language, and write some code to start the server and call it from the client. Here is a code example of such a description file:
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