Thrift

I’ve been asked recently, what’s the difference between Swagger and Thrift (or gRPC)? Although they look similar, they solve fundamentally different problems. Let’s look at the differences. Swagger At the most basic level, Swagger is a REST API specification language. The great part is that there is an entire ecosystem of tools built around this specification language to support API design, client and server code generation, and interactive documentation. Key Features REST + JSON API framework. JSON requests and responses. Code generation. Documentation generation. Thrift Thrift is a software framework for supporting RPC. An interface definition language is used to describe your system in terms of data types and interfaces, the Thrift compiler generates client and server code that match your definition, and the Thrift library handles serialization and transport. ...

After reading the Thrift whitepaper and sending your first message, you may still have some questions about how Thrift actually works. This article helps answer those questions by providing a guided tour through the Apache Thrift architecture, highlighting the protocols, transports, and compiler, and how they interact with each other. Thrift from 10,000 feet At a high-level, Thrift is organized into several layers as in Figure 1. The layers highlighted in yellow represent application code that is written by a user. The portions in red represent code generated by the Thrift compiler from an interface definition defined in an IDL file. The layers in orange are portions of Thrift available as library code imported into your application as a dependency. Lastly, the device layer in blue represents the physical device transmitting messages. ...

So you want to use Thrift? You’ve come here because you want to use Apache Thrift and you don’t know where to start. Good. You’re in the right spot. Throughout this document we will develop a simple service that communicates using Thrift. This will introduce you to the workflow for generating client and server code using Thrift and how to Thrift works to separate your application’s business logic from it’s transport methods. ...