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.