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Thrift Tutorial on Ubuntu 11.10
What is Thrift and how can it help you and your team build a highly scalable platform for web services? According to its project page [1], “Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, and OCaml.” Although Facebook open sourced it in April 2007, its documentation could be improved to make it easier to try out and start building prototypes. Even the project’s tutorial page is still a work-in-progress. So, here’s my version of such, specifically for Java on Ubuntu 11.10. I hope you find it useful.
Get Thrift
First, make sure your system meets the requirements specified at [2]. Here’s how you can install the required packages on Ubuntu 11.10.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-program-options-dev libevent-dev automake libtool flex bison pkg-config g++ libssl-dev
Then, install the Java OpenJDK and ant.
$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk ant
Now you can get Thrift. I chose to checkout Thrift from the Apache SVN repository.
$ cd ~/svn
$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/thrift/trunk thrift
You can also simply download the stable, snapshot or archived releases of Thrift from [3].
Build and Install
Now, you’re ready to build and install Thrift on your system.
$ cd thrift
$ ./bootstrap.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ thrift -version
Your First Thrift File
The tutorial directory, thrift/tutorial, contains the files tutorial.thrift and shared.thrift. Cleverly, the tutorial.thrift file teaches you Thrift in a .thrift file! Read those files and start learning.
Build for Java
At this point, you’re probably itching to see something running. For this tutorial, I chose the Java example. The tutorial directory, thrift/tutorial, contains examples under each language’s directory. But, before you can run the Java example, you have to compile the Java library first.
$ cd ~/svn/thrift/lib/java
$ ant
Now, you get to see the code generation engine at work.
Using The Thrift Compiler
$ cd ~/svn/thrift/tutorial
The following command tells Thrift to generate Java code. The -r option tells it to also generate included files.
$ thrift -r –gen java tutorial.thrift
After the command runs, you should see a directory called gen-java. If you look under that directory, you should see two directories: shared and tutorial.
Compile The Example
Now that the code has been generated, you can compile the Java example.
$ cd ~/svn/thrift/tutorial/java
$ ant
Running A Thrift Server
Now, for what you’ve been waiting for, a working example of a client/server application working through Thrift!
$ ./JavaServer &
Starting the simple server…
Starting the secure server…
Running A Thrift Client
$ ./JavaClient simple
If all is well, you should see something like the following:
ping()
1+1=2
Whoa we can divide by 0
15-10=5
Check log: 5
Other Languages
Make sure to try out the other examples for the other languages under each respective directory. You may need to install additional packages to support other languages. Please refer to [5].
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