This afternoon Mark Slee of Facebook made it semi-official: it is Facebook’s intention to place Thrift into the Apache incubator.
For those of you not familiar with Thrift, I’ll quote Mark:
it’s a lightweight system for cross-language programming using code-generation, RPC, and object serialization. It’s designed first and foremost to provide high performance in real-time environments (i.e. Facebook’s backend, no surprises there).
We’ve been experimenting with Thrift a bit and it’s pretty cool. Some interesting parties playing with Thrift like Powerset and the Persai guys. Not to mention it powers Facebook. As a result, it is worth some experimentation. I have a draft posting of building Thrift on OS X which is a little bit of an adventure. I’ll post it once it will actually be useful to anyone.
The real reason I’m excited about Thrift heading to Apache is that it’s the basis of what I think is possibly the coolest technology around right now — Thrudb. Thrudb is a framework for document oriented database services and is the brainchild of Jake Luciani of 3rd Rail. You can see Thrudb in action at JunkDepot. Jake has a nice write up on Thrudb on the 3rd Rail blog.
Check it out for yourself and thanks and kudos to Jake.
