Apache Thrift

Apache Thrift is a framework for scalable cross-language services development. Compared to SOAP-based and JSON-based web services, Thrift uses its own interface definition language and binary format in communication.

Here are the steps to setup thrift and use it to build a hello world web service.

1. Get Thrift source code.

git clone https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/thrift.git thrift
cd thrift

2. Install required tools and libraries.

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-program-options-dev libevent-dev automake libtool flex bison pkg-config g++ libssl-dev

3. Build and install Thrift

./bootstrap.sh
./configure
make
make install

4. Define a simple service interface

# helloworld.thrift
service Foo {
    string bar();
}

5. Generate boilerplate codes

thrift --gen cpp helloworld.thrift
thrift --gen py helloworld.thrift

6. Implement the server in C++.

In gen-cpp folder, edit the file Foo_server.skeleton.cpp, which is an auto-generated skeleton file for server implementation.

class FooHandler : virtual public FooIf {
 public:
  void bar(std::string& _return) {
      _return = "Hello World";
  }
};

In gen-cpp folder, create a CMakeLists.txt file with the following content.

cmake_minimum_required (VERSION 2.6)
project (server)
link_libraries(libthrift.so)
aux_source_directory(. sources)
add_executable(server ${sources})

Then run the following commands.

cmake. && make

7. Implement the client in Python.

In gen-py folder, create a client.py with the following content.

import sys
from thrift.transport import TTransport
from thrift.transport import TSocket
from thrift.protocol import TBinaryProtocol
from helloworld import Foo
from helloworld.ttypes import *

socket = TSocket.TSocket('localhost', 9090)
transport = TTransport.TBufferedTransport(socket)
protocol = TBinaryProtocol.TBinaryProtocol(transport)
client = Foo.Client(protocol)
transport.open()
print(client.bar())
transport.close()

9. Start server.

cd gen-cpp
server &

10. Start client.

cd gen-py
python client.py

And the text Hello World should be printed out.