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==Facebook's Thrift: Scalable Cross-Language Development==
Mark Slee, Technical Lead, Facebook
Facebook's Thrift project is aimed at creating a simple and lightweight system that will allow programmers to utilize the advantages of different programming languages to manage one system.
Thrift allows a developer to program in multiple languages, and allow them to communicate with one another by use of the Thrift system, which the developer creates a simple thrift file, which can then be transposed into many coding languages.
To quote Facebook's explination of Thrift:
<blockquote>"Thrift is a software library and set of code-generation tools developed
at Facebook to expedite development and implementation of
efficient and scalable backend services. Its primary goal is to enable
efficient and reliable communication across programming languages
by abstracting the portions of each language that tend to
require the most customization into a common library that is implemented
in each language. Specifically, Thrift allows developers to
define datatypes and service interfaces in a single language-neutral
file and generate all the necessary code to build RPC clients and
servers."</blockquote>
I found the talk a little hard to digest, because it was really more of a lecture on how to use Thrift, and the little details of how Thrift does something specific, instead of a more general overview of what it is, and why they made it, and where developers may be able to use the system to better help their own systems. It was a lot of specifics to take in at one time, having never heard of Thrift before, or ever using it before.
However, I did manage to take away some knowledge of the Thrift system, even though most of the details remain to escape me.
==Conclusion==
