Summary

Distributed systems, SOA, SOAP, WSDL, XML, and JSON, are some of the popular buzzwords that are frequently encountered by developers interested in creating applications that talk to each other. It is often hard to comprehend how these theoretical concepts can be used to accomplish the goal.

In this chapter, we learned what these distributed systems are and Apache Thrift's role in achieving communication between different services. We also discussed its position among similar solutions and their advantages and disadvantages.

In the upcoming chapters, we will install Apache Thrift, generate and run our simple services, and discuss the features in great detail. Having this knowledge, we will advance to prepare our own client-server application using Apache Thrift.