Programmer's Guide to Apache Thrift

by Randy Abernethy

Summary

Programmer's Guide to Apache Thrift provides comprehensive coverage of the Apache Thrift framework along with a developer's-eye view of modern distributed application architecture.

Foreword by Jens Geyer.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

Thrift-based distributed software systems are built out of communicating components that use different languages, protocols, and message types. Sitting between them is Thrift, which handles data serialization, transport, and service implementation. Thrift supports many client and server environments and a host of languages ranging from PHP to JavaScript, and from C++ to Go.

About the Book

Programmer's Guide to Apache Thrift provides comprehensive coverage of distributed application communication using the Thrift framework. Packed with code examples and useful insight, this book presents best practices for multi-language distributed development. You'll take a guided tour through transports, protocols, IDL, and servers as you explore programs in C++, Java, and Python. You'll also learn how to work with platforms ranging from browser-based clients to enterprise servers.

What's inside


Complete coverage of Thrift's IDL
Building and serializing complex user-defined types
Plug-in protocols, transports, and data compression
Creating cross-language services with RPC and messaging systems

About the Reader

Readers should be comfortable with a language like Python, Java, or C++ and the basics of service-oriented or microservice architectures.

About the Author

Randy Abernethy is an Apache Thrift Project Management Committee member and a partner at RX-M.

Table of Contents


PART 1 - APACHE THRIFT OVERVIEW
Introduction to Apache Thrift
Apache Thrift architecture
Building, testing, and debugging
PART 2 - PROGRAMMING APACHE THRIFT
Moving bytes with transports
Serializing data with protocols
Apache Thrift IDL
User-defined types
Implementing services
Handling exceptions
Servers
PART 3 - APACHE THRIFT LANGUAGES
Building clients and servers with C++
Building clients and servers with Java
Building C# clients and servers with .NET Core and Windows
Building Node.js clients and servers
Apache Thrift and JavaScript
Scripting Apache Thrift
Thrift in the enterprise

592 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2015

Reviews

[Peter Aronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four-and-a-half stars. A very solid description of the Apache Thrift RPC (Remote Procedure Call) system and how to program against it(*). The examples, which are simple, clear and annotated, are primarily in C++ Java and Python (although third section of the book covers a bunch of other langues too). While it does give guidance on using Thrift's built in server code to build RPC servers, it does not cover at all how those servers should be started or managed, which is a bit of a lack.

(* In an earlier portion of my life I did a bunch of work using ONC-RPC, and actually wore out a copy of Power Programming with RPC, so I am not sure how well this would work as a first introduction to RPC.)