Facebook's Cross-Language Network Library

koreth writes "Facebook has released Thrift, a toolkit for making remote method calls. It generates interoperable network code in C++, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Its protocol is much more lightweight (and probably much higher-performance) than SOAP or CORBA. Facebook uses it internally for high-traffic services like search. The license is extremely permissive."

Excellent news!

Does this mean I can Poke You with my Python?

Perl?

Any ports to Perl? Anyone?

Re:Perl port now available

I don't get it. I ran it and it doesn't seem to do anything.

Re:Perl port now available

hmm, now that you say it, it does seem to fail under certain circumstances. Here's an optimized version though:

-lp040 $@+=$@%1e3*(9x(3*y/dbl/\xe4/-4*/e/))||/te|\xe4/./. /*$+['^A^S^\^I^O^Z^V^L^G'!~($&^o&$')].e./y/}{$_=$@ ;s/\B(?=(...)*$)/,/g

extremely permissive

I like my women like I like my licenses: extremely permissive.

Re:extremely permissive

it's a key feature if you plan on redistributing her

Ohhh, goody

Just what the world needed, Yet Another RPC Framework. I guess on the bright side, it can't possibly suck any harder than CORBA.

Re:Ohhh, goody

http://www.zeroc.com/ice.html [zeroc.com] is supposed to be Corba well done. Have you tried it?

No, thanks. I prefer my CORBA medium-rare.

Re:Ohhh, goody

I've worked with CORBA at my last three jobs, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've used OmniORB, Orbacus, JacORB and MICO - all of which work very well, although the licensing cost of Orbacus puts it out of reach for most of the things I work on. I do have to wrap a lot of the C++ stuff in helper classes though, as the mapping for that language is far too baroque. One of the consultants at IONA has produced an open source CORBA utilities library [ciaranmchale.com] that which is far more extensive than my one.

potential privacy concern?

I think this raises a potential privacy concern. Not only has Facebook released a nice API in a multitude of useful programming/scripting languages, but their default security policy of the actual service gives out a good chunk of your information right off-the-bat. For the uninformed Facebook user, this spells trouble. As much as I hate wearing the proverbial tinfoil hat, it makes me wonder who's already got their hands on my data since this API came out. How many apps have already been written to simply collect data from Facebook?

Re:potential privacy concern?

RTFA

They're not giving away any API to their data.

What they've released is nothing more than a platform-independant RPC protocol.

And a weird one at that. Instead of relying on common, generic data-format such as XML, they seem to be relying on a custom compiler for their own definition language. I'm sure the underlying data-format is usable without the compiler, but then there could be better methods for writing/reading it.

Re:potential privacy concern?

He's not saying THIS is an API, but that they have released one. Which is true; I've dabbled with it a bit myself.

"Probably" much higher performance?

Post benchmarks to prove a statement or don't state it at all. Don't use weasel words [wikipedia.org] to try to convey a point of view without solid evidence. BTW, it seems this statement was made by either the submitter or the editor, since I couldn't find anything mentioning it on TFA.

Indexes

Why does the format include those "1:", "2:", etc. indexes in the structure definitions and method argument lists?
Couldn't it do this automatically, or can you mix them up in some way?

OT: A good C++ RPC library without code generating

According to the tutorial this api relies on code generation, which I personally don't like.

Does anybody know any good C++ RPC library which uses templates and which does not need code generating with any external tool nor executable?

C++ templates allows metaprogramming, so such tools should be able to be developped, but I don't know any. Does anybody know any?

- Garo

Re:OT: A good C++ RPC library without code generat

Does anybody know any good C++ RPC library which uses templates and which does not need code generating with any external tool nor executable?

Yup, sockets. Every RPC-ish system I'm aware of (Sun RPC/XDR, CORBA, SOAP, RMI, ASN.1) needs a code generator that produces the stubs which make it easier than using raw sockets. The code that's produced by these stub compilers can be pretty small and well optimised (apart from SOAP), plus you shouldn't need to edit it by hand. Some compilers, such as a decent one for CORBAs IDL, can also produce the boilerplate code that you then fill in with your implementation of the RPC calls. While I usually dislike generated code, when it comes to RPC systems I'm quite glad they do a decent job of hiding complexity from me.

The license

Is basically the MIT license [opensource.org] with a few tweaks to the first paragraph (e.g. person -> person or organisation), the second paragraph expanded to cover some of the ideas in the middle section of the BSD licence [opensource.org] and the third paragraph verbatim (or practically verbatim). Note that it appears equivalent to the MIT license in that there's no non-endorsement clause as you'd find in BSD or Apache 1.1 [opensource.org].

Because what the world really needs....

... is yet another RPC solution.

Pretty low level, but interesting

Same ideas that have been around for 20+ years, but I have to admit it's a fairly nice implementation of a close-to-the-wire protocol.

They could have gone more flexible and abstract; structs are *bad* for you, and they're missing a fair amount of opportunity to make things dynamic, e.g., growable arrays, hashes, sets, arbitrary nested structures, and even things like canonicalized timestamps, which are a quite important (but often neglected) platform-dependent type (see how often time gets mangled when you go multi-platform...).

As for efficiency, it wouldn't be hard to be better than SOAP. I have some horror stories...

Re:Pretty low level, but interesting

growable arrays

On the transport layer? That doesn't make any sense. The endpoint implementations insert into language-standard growable arrays (PHP native indexed arrays, C++ std::vector, et al), as they should.

hashes

Easily represented as maps.

sets

They have those. Templated type 'set' in the Thrift interface file (just like std::set).

arbitrary nested structures

And those. map<string, map<string, set<string> > > is a perfectly valid construct in the Thrift file, and will emit (as you might expect) the same thing using STL data structures in the C++ endpoint, or nested assocative arrays in the PHP endpoint. The same thing applies to non-templated structure nesting as well, and to templating around user defined structures.

canonicalized timestamps

There's no good reason to make a separate timestamp class; an int64 is plenty big enough to hold microseconds (or nanoseconds, even) since the epoch.

Not Bad!

.....however I still think Zuckerberg needs to DIAF. While we are at it, toss Tom in there for good measure

Pointless criticism

So they wrote something in-house, for their own reasons. Open-source advocates say "release everything... it'll be useful to someone". So they did release it, and then they get slammed for not using the existing standards and because people don't like their methodologies.

Bravo.

So, in English...

what is it? What does it do?

Re:Facebook is releasing this?

Yeah, but look at all that juicy personal data just waiting to be mined. :)

Re:Facebook is releasing this?

You do realize that Facebook is a fantastic example of a clean, functional UI that only uses fancy 'web 2.0' features ala AJAX where it's actually useful?

MySpace, on the other hand, is a piece of shit.

Re:Facebook is releasing this?

I can't agree more! And the creator of Facebook has said multiple times that they are not going to allow custom CSS on profiles or crazy stuff like that. They have also gone a long way with privacy settings (after much outrage in the facebook community)

As a college student, I love Facebook. I use it to keep up with high school friends, keep in contact with people from the school I transfered from, know the people in my classes so I can throw questions at them if I have one, and since I am bad with names it is a great tool to remember people by!

The information I have on Facebook you could probably [wikipedia.org] find [nickcatalano.com] elsewhere [google.com]. But having such a clean interface is great. and their improvements are going to be great [facebook.com] (membership required)

Re:Facebook is releasing this?

Ignoring the users of Facebook, the site is about the use of technology. They made their job easy on themselves and created a framework to make their own jobs that much easier. And...in the same spirit of other companies, are releasing that software to the public. I applaud this. May the best framework win!