thrift

What is thrift?

The thrift npm package is a JavaScript implementation of the Apache Thrift framework, which is used for scalable cross-language services development. Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file, and it generates code to be used across multiple languages. This makes it easier to build and maintain services that communicate across different programming languages.

What are thrift's main functionalities?

Defining a Thrift Service

This code demonstrates how to define a Thrift service in Node.js. The service is defined in a Thrift IDL file, which is then compiled to generate the necessary JavaScript files. The server listens on port 9090 and implements a method called `myMethod`.

const thrift = require('thrift');
const MyService = require('./gen-nodejs/MyService');
const ttypes = require('./gen-nodejs/my_types');

const server = thrift.createServer(MyService, {
  myMethod: function(arg, result) {
    console.log('myMethod called with:', arg);
    result(null, 'response');
  }
});

server.listen(9090);

Creating a Thrift Client

This code demonstrates how to create a Thrift client in Node.js. The client connects to the Thrift server running on localhost at port 9090 and calls the `myMethod` function, passing an argument and handling the response.

const thrift = require('thrift');
const MyService = require('./gen-nodejs/MyService');

const connection = thrift.createConnection('localhost', 9090);
const client = thrift.createClient(MyService, connection);

client.myMethod('argument', (err, response) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err);
  } else {
    console.log('Response:', response);
  }
  connection.end();
});

Defining Thrift Data Types

This Thrift IDL file defines a data structure `MyStruct` and a service `MyService` with a method `myMethod` that takes `MyStruct` as an argument. This file is used to generate the necessary code for both the client and server.

namespace js MyService

struct MyStruct {
  1: i32 id,
  2: string name
}

service MyService {
  string myMethod(1: MyStruct myStruct)
}

Other packages similar to thrift

grpc

gRPC is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC framework originally developed by Google. It uses HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the interface description language, and provides features such as authentication, load balancing, and more. Compared to Thrift, gRPC is more modern and has better support for streaming and bi-directional communication.

protobufjs

protobufjs is a pure JavaScript implementation of Protocol Buffers, Google's data interchange format. While it does not provide RPC capabilities out of the box like Thrift, it is often used in conjunction with gRPC to define and serialize structured data. It is more lightweight and focused solely on data serialization.

avro-js

avro-js is a JavaScript library for working with Apache Avro, a data serialization system. Avro is similar to Thrift in that it provides a compact, fast, binary data format. However, Avro is more focused on data serialization and schema evolution, and does not provide RPC capabilities.

README

Apache Thrift

Introduction

Thrift is a lightweight, language-independent software stack for point-to-point RPC implementation. Thrift provides clean abstractions and implementations for data transport, data serialization, and application level processing. The code generation system takes a simple definition language as input and generates code across programming languages that uses the abstracted stack to build interoperable RPC clients and servers.

Thrift makes it easy for programs written in different programming languages to share data and call remote procedures. With support for 28 programming languages, chances are Thrift supports the languages that you currently use.

Thrift is specifically designed to support non-atomic version changes across client and server code. This allows you to upgrade your server while still being able to service older clients; or have newer clients issue requests to older servers. An excellent community-provided write-up about thrift and compatibility when versioning an API can be found in the Thrift Missing Guide.

For more details on Thrift's design and implementation, see the Thrift whitepaper included in this distribution, or at the README.md file in your particular subdirectory of interest.

Status

Branch	Travis	Appveyor	Coverity Scan	codecov.io	Website
master
0.13.0
0.12.0

Releases

Thrift does not maintain a specific release calendar at this time.

We strive to release twice yearly. Download the current release.

License

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Project Hierarchy

thrift/

compiler/

Contains the Thrift compiler, implemented in C++.

lib/

Contains the Thrift software library implementation, subdivided by
language of implementation.

cpp/
go/
java/
php/
py/
rb/
...

test/

Contains sample Thrift files and test code across the target programming
languages.

tutorial/

Contains a basic tutorial that will teach you how to develop software
using Thrift.

Development

To build the same way Travis CI builds the project you should use docker. We have comprehensive building instructions for docker.

Requirements

See http://thrift.apache.org/docs/install for a list of build requirements (may be stale). Alternatively, see the docker build environments for a list of prerequisites.

Resources

More information about Thrift can be obtained on the Thrift webpage at:

 http://thrift.apache.org

Acknowledgments

Thrift was inspired by pillar, a lightweight RPC tool written by Adam D'Angelo, and also by Google's protocol buffers.

Installation

If you are building from the first time out of the source repository, you will need to generate the configure scripts. (This is not necessary if you downloaded a tarball.) From the top directory, do:

./bootstrap.sh

Once the configure scripts are generated, thrift can be configured. From the top directory, do:

./configure

You may need to specify the location of the boost files explicitly. If you installed boost in /usr/local, you would run configure as follows:

./configure --with-boost=/usr/local

Note that by default the thrift C++ library is typically built with debugging symbols included. If you want to customize these options you should use the CXXFLAGS option in configure, as such:

./configure CXXFLAGS='-g -O2'
./configure CFLAGS='-g -O2'
./configure CPPFLAGS='-DDEBUG_MY_FEATURE'

To enable gcov required options -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage enable them:

./configure  --enable-coverage

Run ./configure --help to see other configuration options

Please be aware that the Python library will ignore the --prefix option and just install wherever Python's distutils puts it (usually along the lines of /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/). If you need to control where the Python modules are installed, set the PY_PREFIX variable. (DESTDIR is respected for Python and C++.)

Make thrift:

make

From the top directory, become superuser and do:

make install

Uninstall thrift:

make uninstall

Note that some language packages must be installed manually using build tools better suited to those languages (at the time of this writing, this applies to Java, Ruby, PHP).

Look for the README.md file in the lib// folder for more details on the installation of each language library package.

Package Managers

Apache Thrift is available via a number of package managers, a list which is is steadily growing. A more detailed overview can be found at the Apache Thrift web site under "Libraries" and/or in the respective READMEs for each language under /lib

Testing

There are a large number of client library tests that can all be run from the top-level directory.

make -k check

This will make all of the libraries (as necessary), and run through the unit tests defined in each of the client libraries. If a single language fails, the make check will continue on and provide a synopsis at the end.

To run the cross-language test suite, please run:

make cross

This will run a set of tests that use different language clients and servers.