Apache Thrift Reviews & Product Details

My company is a fan of Apache and we have used many products before. But Apache Thrift brought with it some versatility that we were able to use to our advantage. We run a website that is visited by over 10,000 people daily from all backgrounds and Thrift helped us set up an interface where many languages were supported. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It was a good overall program only issue we had was integrating the language it’s written in as we primarily use .net and c# but we were able to get support to integrate it into our framework. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Able to use this with several languages and create generated files for each. Currently, I use it with Golang and Javascript. I know others who use it with Java and Python as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Order of the structs do matter using Apache Thrift. So if the second struct is a field in the first struct, there will be errors. To get around this, any struct which is a field of another should be put above the ones that use them as fields. There are other branches of this tool which take care of that bug. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apache Thrift supports almost all programming languages Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Documentation is limited. There are still some issues when applying new technologies like Spring, Spring Boot Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Simple, Java-like service definition syntax

Autogeneration of full client and stub interfaces for server side

Easy stub generation via single CLI command

Apache 2.0 license, allowing it to be used in FOSS as well as commercial/proprietary products Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Exceptions from server-side have to be deserialized and rethrown on client side, in order to obtain the proper stacktraces; not having the stacktrace could be good for production but it is convenient to at least have an option to enable them during dev/test.

Thrift Java library pulls in some extra dependencies, which can conflict with the rest of your project (like Apache HttpComponents, which to my awareness wasn't even necessary for our basic binary-protocol implementation) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Although it was initially developed by Facebook, it's now open source under the Apache License. Easy to read definition files. Considering that Thrift's WSDL documents tend to be smaller and more straightforward means that it has easy to read definition files. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cannot abstract api functionality/data to edge cases in distributed architecture. Instead uses localized api pattern. Thrift is slightly slower than google's protobuffers (benchmarks state that it's 10%, concerning either TBinary or TCompact protocols) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Incredibley easy to use! There is a bit of a learning curve but after a couple of months you get the hang of it! I cannot imagine working without it now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think we can work on boot up time. It take significantly longer to load than anything else on my computer. I am not the only one, I am sure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best feature that I found in Apache thrift is it's ability to compile server and client code for different target languages using a common thrift interface description file. With this feature, it is possible to develop your server-side interface in one language, say in Java, and generate client stubs in different languages including Java, C++, PHP. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main thing I dislike about thrift is its inability to define inheritance when defining thrift objects. Because of this, we had created multiple data transfer object definition with redundant attributes. If inheritance was available as a first-class citizen in thrift this could have been avoided Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A large number of protocols are supported including but not limited to Tbinary, TCompact, and TJSON. Clean library and no framework to code. No build dependencies Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Socket per client thread model means a lot of sockets. Multiple services cannot be registered per socket Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It’s simple to use, this making it easier to get things done and it isn’t expensive Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I do not think there is or was anything that I disliked about it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The simplicity of the software. Can be used with several languages making it easy to work with clients. Can be used across several networks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The large data handling can create issues. Better support would help as well. Errors in use with some applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.