When to choose Apache Thrift

When designing and developing applications that have to communicate with each other, one may go through the whole evolution process involving the solutions presented in the previous section. Many services start as a very limited tool, which works quite well with some simple custom protocol. But the data that needs to be transferred may become more and more complicated than the need for some format, such as JSON or XML appears JSON-RPC or XML-RPC may be then used.

As the service is growing and is exposed to more external applications, the need to standardize the architecture and proper documentation arises. In such cases, using web services based on SOAP and WSDL seems to be a proper idea. If your application's goal is to operate on collections of elements, RESTful API may be a good solution.

But there are situations where one needs to transfer binary data and provide flexibility for changing the definition of the services along with support for different platforms and languages; all this in an environment where high performance is crucial. In these cases, serialization and remote procedure call for frameworks such as Apache Avro, Protocol Buffers, and Apache Thrift. From these three, the last one offers the widest selection of serialization formats, and transports along with remote procedure call implementation.