MEAP Edition Manning Early Access Program The Programmer’s Guide to Apache Thrift Version 5 Copyright 2013 Manning Publications For more information on this and other Manning titles go to www.manning.com ©Manning Publications Co. We welcome reader comments about anything in the manuscript - other than typos and other simple mistakes. These will be cleaned up during production of the book by copyeditors and proofreaders. http://www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=873 Licensed to Daniel Gavrila <
[email protected]> Welcome Hello and welcome to the third MEAP update for The Programmer’s Guide to Apache Thrift. This update adds Chapter 7, Designing and Serializing User Defined Types. This latest chapter is the first of the application layer chapters in Part 2. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 cover transports, error handling and protocols respectively. These chapters describe the foundational elements of Apache Thrift. Chapter 6 describes Apache Thrift IDL in depth, introducing the tools which enable us to describe data types and services in IDL. Chapters 7 through 9 bring these concepts into action, covering the three key applications areas of Apache Thrift in turn: User Defined Types (UDTs), Services and Servers. Chapter 7 introduces Apache Thrift IDL UDTs and provides insight into the critical role played by interface evolution in quality type design. Using IDL to effectively describe cross language types greatly simplifies the transmission of common data structures over messaging systems and other generic communications interfaces. Chapter 7 demonstrates the process of serializing types for use with external interfaces, disk I/O and in combination with Apache Thrift transport layer compression.