Understanding the characteristics of Apache Thrift versus TCP socket servers?

Question

I have some experience writing TCP socket servers using OpenSSL and I'm looking to understand more about Apache Thrift. I've looked over some basic examples of Thrift servers, and I understand that Thrift can handle pipes.

Can someone provide a simple explanation of the ways a Thrift server differs from a TCP server (apart from the use of pipes)? And do Thrift frameworks use a different transport protocol?

I know this is a straightforward question, but I can't seem to find a beginner level explanation.

Answer 1

[...] ways a Thrift server differs from a TCP Server?

Thrift is at least one abstraction layer above raw sockets. It provides you with an abstraction which allows you to send and receive information across any medium, one of which could be TCP sockets.

The underlying transport medium itself is not important, nor is the protocol used (binary, compact, JSON ... you name it). Both is entirely transparent to the rest of your application.

In other words, you develop against a type-safe service API, rather than programming sockets or parse some JSON on your own.

Instead of fiddling around with bytes, encodings and fighting the subtleties of sockets, Thrift allows you to focus on what you want to do with that Service as a client and/or implementing the server-side logic.

Plus you may change transport and/or protocol as needed without affecting the rest of the code.