Is there an IPC transport implementation for Thrift ? or low latency SOA solutions

Question

I want to introduce SOA to a low latency system without the overhead of TCP communication(even on the same machine). Thirft seems like a great fit as I have both Java and php processes. Is there an IPC transport implementation for thrift, or any other good idea that could help in this scenario?

Answer 1

You could use Thrift to serialize your objects and then use IPC method of your liking(named pipe,message queues etc). The following is a simple example using pipes

1. We have a an object of type Message which contains some information
2. Php process is the producer of the message
3. Java process is the consumer

Thrift model

struct Message {
  1: i32 uid,
  2: string information,
}

generate thrift sources

thrift --gen java message.thrift
thrift --gen php message.thrift

PHP producer

<?php
$GLOBALS['THRIFT_ROOT'] = 'src';
require_once $GLOBALS['THRIFT_ROOT'].'/Thrift.php';
require_once $GLOBALS['THRIFT_ROOT'].'/protocol/TBinarySerializer.php'; // this generates serialized string from our obect
require_once $GLOBALS['THRIFT_ROOT'].'/packages/message/message_types.php'; //from generated thrift sources
//create new message
$message = new Message();
$message->uid = '1';
$message->information = 'Some info';
var_dump($message);

//serialize
$serializer = new TBinarySerializer(); 
$serialized_message = $serializer->serialize($message);
var_dump($serialized_message);

//write to a pipe
if (pcntl_fork() == 0) {
$namedPipe = '/tmp/pipe';
if (! file_exists($namedPipe)) {
   posix_mkfifo($namedPipe, 0600);
}

$fifo = fopen($namedPipe, 'w');

fwrite($fifo, $serialized_message);
exit(0);
}
?>

Java Consumer

        //read from pipe
    FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/pipe"));
    int availableBytes = fileInputStream.available();

    byte[] b = new byte[availableBytes]; 
        fileInputStream.read(b , 0, availableBytes);
        //deserialize
    TDeserializer tDeserializer = new TDeserializer();
    Message deserMessage = new Message();
    tDeserializer.deserialize(deserMessage, b);
    System.out.println(deserMessage.getInformation());
    //prints "Some info"

Answer 2

See here regarding a cross-platform pipe transport for the Thrift C++ library. This should be straight-forward to port to the other languages. If you only need to support *NIX, you could use domain sockets which is already supported by TSocket. Simply pass in (name) instead of (host, port) to its constructor.