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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
With modern software systems being increasingly complex, providing a scalable communication architecture for applications in different languages is tedious. The Apache Thrift framework is the solution to this problem! It helps build efficient and easy-to-maintain services and offers a plethora of options matching your application type by supporting several popular programming languages, including C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml, and Delphi.
This book will help you set aside the basics of service-oriented systems through your first Apache Thrift-powered app. Then, progressing to more complex examples, it will provide you with tips for running large-scale applications in production environments.
You will learn how to assess when Apache Thrift is the best tool to be used. To start with, you will run a simple example application, learning the framework's structure along the way; you will quickly advance to more complex systems that will help you solve various real-life problems. Moreover, you will be able to add a communication layer to every application written in one of the popular programming languages, with support for various data types and error handling. Further, you will learn how pre-eminent companies use Apache Thrift in their popular applications.
This book is a great starting point if you want to use one of the best tools available to develop cross-language applications in service-oriented architectures.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Learning Apache Thrift
Learning Apache Thrift
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2015
Production reference: 1181215
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-274-6
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Krzysztof Rakowski
Reviewer
Faisal Rahman
Commissioning Editor
Dipika Gaonkar
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About the Author
Krzysztof Rakowski has 13 years of professional experience in IT as a team leader, software developer and architect, and agile project manager. During the course of his career, he has helped major global brands establish their online presence using scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance systems. His broad experience comes from various industries, including interactive advertising, banking, retail, and e-commerce. He is a recognized expert, Zend Certified Engineer, and a Professional Scrum Master.
Currently, Krzysztof works for the largest online shop in central and eastern Europe—where he is responsible for supervising teams of software engineers and project managers who pair the smartest IT solutions with the best customer experience.
He enjoys sharing his knowledge through articles and presentations. He occasionally writes about his side projects on his website at www.rakowski.pro.
In his free time, Krzysztof likes to travel around the world with his wife, go snowboarding, or read a good book.
I would like to thank my wife, Anna, for her constant support, encouragement, and patience. I also want to thank my parents, parents-in-law, and brother for inspiring me to reach my goals.
This book wouldn't be possible without the generous support of the friendly people at Packt Publishing.
About the Reviewer
Faisal Rahman is a developer, writer, mentor, and tech enthusiast. His passion extends from architecting secure, scalable, and maintainable software to finding optimal algorithms and data structures for the smallest problems in a system. His research on optimization algorithms for known mathematical problems has been published in reputed journals. He is currently working as a software engineer at Microsoft.
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I dedicate my work on this book to my son, Ignacy, who will be born as this book goes into print.
Preface
In 2007, Facebook's engineers needed to integrate the various applications powering their website. As their engineering culture encouraged selecting the best tools for a task without imposing strict rules regarding the choice of technology, their applications were written in a wide spectrum of different programming languages, which were considered the best for the given task.
Looking for the best solution to fulfill their needs, the engineers reviewed lots of different frameworks that were already available on the market. None of them was deemed sufficient in terms of performance or flexibility. They made a decision to develop their own solution, which became a standard to integrate all the services on Facebook.
As they considered their solution to be exceeding the current standards of the market, they released their code to the open source community, passing the task of maintaining their work on the project to the Apache Software Foundation. Since then, Apache Thrift has been developed by a large group of volunteers.
Now you can use Apache Thrift as a tool to expose your own services that are written in different languages and make your applications communicate with each other. Regardless of whether you intend to work on a small-scale application or huge enterprise, Apache Thrift may be one of the best tools for you.
In Learning Apache Thrift, you will find an introduction to various concepts of the services around you and some service-oriented architecture (SOA). Then you will learn how to use Apache Thrift in various projects. We will discuss advanced concepts too to see how the giants of the industry use this framework, and you will get some solid advice and much needed inspiration.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing Apache Thrift, gives you basic information about the environment where services are needed. You will learn about the history of Apache Thrift and its position in the market. This chapter provides some solid understanding of the context in which Apache Thrift exists.
Chapter 2, Installing and Running Apache Thrift, provides you with a quick tutorial that will allow you to have Apache Thrift up and running on your machine in no time. Instructions for Linux (Debian and CentOS), Windows, and Mac OS X are included.
Chapter 3, Running Your First Apache Thrift Service and Client, gives you the ability to see Apache Thrift in action. Simple instructions will get you through the process of setting up a server and client that run in two different programming languages (PHP and Python) and communicate with each other.
Chapter 4, Understanding How Apache Thrift Works, provides you with real knowledge of the framework's internals. You will learn about its components, network stacks, data types, interface description language (IDL), and the programming languages that are supported. You will also find out about its limitations and how to deal with them. This chapter is essential to understand the concept of "under the hood", and how to design your own Apache Thrift-supported services.
Chapter 5, Generating and Running Code in Different Languages, provides you with a toolbox of essential information about different popular programming languages and how you can use them with Apache Thrift. You may read it from the beginning to the end or just focus on those languages that interest you. The same example is used for every language, so you can easily compare the server's and client's implementation for each of them.
Chapter 6, Handling Errors in Apache Thrift, gives you information on how to deal with undesirable situations that may occur when you run your service or client. Handling errors is an important part of any programming project, and is especially essential when dealing with cross-platform applications where errors occur frequently due to the nature of the distributed architecture.
Chapter 7, An Example Client-Server Application, gathers knowledge from the whole book into one example client-server application. You will build the code step by step. The example touches every aspect of Apache Thrift and is a bit more complicated than what you have done until now. Three different languages will be used (PHP, Python, and Ruby).
Chapter 8, Advanced Usage of Apache Thrift, inspires you to further expand your Apache Thrift skills. You will learn how big companies use this framework, how to run your applications in production, and how to address security, performance, and scalability issues. You will be also be given access to other interesting Apache Thrift-related projects.
What you need for this book
To run the examples in this book, you will need any modern computer running Linux—CentOS or Debian (preferred)—Mac OS X, or Windows. You will also need some text editor to edit your code.
You will also need an Internet connection to download Apache Thrift and other required software on your computer.
Who this book is for
If you have some experience of developing applications in one or more languages that are supported by Apache Thrift (C++, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and others) and want to broaden your knowledge and skills in building cross-platform, scalable applications, then this book is for you.
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Chapter 1. Introducing Apache Thrift
There is a milestone in the life of every sufficiently large application that marks the point when it is too big to be maintained as a monolith. For some systems, it is in their blueprints from the very beginning, while for others, it comes as a growth induced necessity and brings along the need for massive rebuild.
Apache Thrift is one of the tools that assist in building scalable, distributed systems, spanning across different platforms and languages. Originally developed for internal use by Facebook, now it is an open source software project backed by the Apache Foundation. It is characterized by a wide range of supported languages, flexibility, and performance.
In this chapter, you will learn about the scenarios where using Apache Thrift may be necessary. You will also get familiar with its basic properties and how it is compared to other similar frameworks. It is essential to know the big picture to be able to select the best tool for your job.
Let's see how you can put Apache Thrift to good use!
Distributed systems and their services
Imagine typical web applications that you use every day, such as search engines, messaging platforms, or social networks. Under one web address, they deliver different services. For example, a social network delivers people search, messaging, and users' profile pages. While you access them by one user interface—a web page written in HTML and JavaScript—what you see in your browser is only a gateway. Your request to message a friend is being relayed by the underlying application to the messaging service—an application which is specifically designed to deal with exchange of messages between the social network's users.
Service-oriented architecture
Messaging service, which we use as an example here, may be written in a completely different programming language than web application. It is a design decision. The system architect may decide that interface of your social network; the web pages that you see every time you log in will be easier to manage and maintain when they are written in, let's say, PHP or Ruby on Rails. However, messaging systems may be written in Python as the architect may decide that this language offers better libraries for this task. On the other hand, search engines or other tools that need superb performance are often written in C++. There may be also some internal corporate applications in Java or C#.
Those applications, of course, need to communicate with each other. But how to do that? There is a concept in software design called service-oriented architecture (SOA). We just discussed the first part of this principle. It focuses on creating applications around distinct tasks. If every task is performed by a different application, there is a need for some means of communication between them. To achieve this goal, applications expose services that are used by other applications. Typically, they are accessible over some medium, that is, an internal network or the Internet. They are self-contained and autonomous, which means they are independent of other services and are able to deliver complete response when queried. They should also be well documented so that any developer can use them.
Distributed systems
When—as in our example of social network—we have a system that consists of many autonomous services, we call such systems distributed systems. Depending on the scale, business needs, or technical constraints, the systems may be spread over lots of computers in a local network, the Internet, or just on a single machine. Benefitting from the SOA principles, you may run and test on your desktop computer distributed system of the same logical architecture, which will be then used on hundreds of servers in the production environment.
There are many advantages of SOA in distributed systems over monolithic applications. Let's discuss some of them.
Maintainability
The greatest advantage of distributed systems in SOA is their maintainability, which means ease of performing all the tasks related to the caretaking of the software. If the system consists of many applications, each dedicated to one task or type of tasks instead of one big monolith, some of the actions can be performed a lot easier:
Scalability
Many systems are required to perform well under a high load. It is not only the domain of web applications, but it is best pictured here: popular websites receive hundreds of millions of page views per day, which constitutes a high traffic load. To withstand such increasing stress, systems need to scale. The most obvious way, known by every computer user, is to add RAM or switch to a better CPU if applications don't run smoothly. But there is a limit to such scaling (called vertical scaling). You don't expect Google to run on a single powerful computer, do you?
The other type of scalability is horizontal scaling, which means adding more computers (called nodes) to the system. For example, our imaginary social network system may consist of several web application nodes, a few database nodes, and also some user search nodes. In properly designed systems, operators can add or remove nodes depending on the expected load and other circumstances. More sophisticated systems can even scale themselves, starting or stopping nodes in the cloud automatically, based on the traffic analysis.
SOA allows multiple nodes of the same function to be accessible to the clients. As services are self-contained, independent of the state of other services, and documented, developers can prepare their software without much care if they will be dealing with one or hundred nodes. In most scenarios, traffic to the services is managed by software or hardware load balancers, making it completely invisible for the client.
Testability
Another advantage of distributed systems is the easiness of testing them and finding and fixing bugs. Independence of services means that they can be tested in isolation from the whole system. Only a particular service's operation is being tested without any influence from other components. Because services should be well documented, it is easy to predict the desired output for a given input. If bugs are found, they can be evaluated and fixed without the need to consider them in the scope of whole system.
