Thrift

Developed at Facebook, its first technical paper was released in Apr 2007. Too late to be listed as a tech term to know about now, but let me continue for those who are catching up with this term.

It’s released to open source and is now a project at Apache software foundation.

Thrift is a framework for implementing RPC in services with cross language support. It provides an Interface definition language (IDL) and has tools to generate code from the IDL in a language of our choice. The client and the server code can be in different languages.

What this means for a developer is

- On the server, use the generated code to actually implement the functionality
- On the client, call the generated stub passing in the appropriate parameters to invoke the function 

The marshalling & un-marshalling of the parameters and return types irrespective of the languages used on the client and server side is taken care of under the hoods by the Thrift framework.

More details at https://thrift.apache.org/

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