Question about the choice of the Thrift broker

[loic]

Hi,

First, I would like to thank you, Doug for your presentation Wednesday
at the SDForum. It was very informative.

I am trying to learn a bit more about Hypertable, and I was wondering
about the reasons why you did choose facebook's Thrift over other
brokers ? What were the key features you needed that others did
have ?
Which other brokers did you considerate ?

Thanks,
Loic.

[Luke]

Since I'm sort of responsible for this particular choice, I'll take
the liberty to answer the question. We've also looked at Ice (from
Zeroc) as a potential middleware but decided against it mainly due to
its license (GPL). We want the client license to be permissive enough
so everyone include commercial vendors can easily write software that
connects to hypertable. Thrift's license is apache and supports more
language bindings (from mainstream php, ruby, java, perl, python, c#
to intelligentsiasish haskell, ocaml and erlang) than anything we've
seen. It's also been heavily tested in production by facebook.

It's not ideal, as the current async interface is much inferior to
Ice's AMI/AMD offers. But I can see capable people working on it (on
the thrift mailing list) and feel comfortable that they'll be
adequately supported in the near future. Feel free to recommend other
open source alternatives though.

__Luke

[loic]

On Apr 25, 8:51 pm, Luke <vic...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Since I'm sort of responsible for this particular choice, I'll take
> the liberty to answer the question. We've also looked at Ice (from
> Zeroc) as a potential middleware but decided against it mainly due to
> its license (GPL). We want the client license to be permissive enough
> so everyone include commercial vendors can easily write software that

Ok, good point.

> connects to hypertable. Thrift's license is apache and supports more
> language bindings (from mainstream php, ruby, java, perl, python, c#
> to intelligentsiasish haskell, ocaml and erlang) than anything we've
> seen. It's also been heavily tested in production by facebook.
>
> It's not ideal, as the current async interface is much inferior to
> Ice's AMI/AMD offers. But I can see capable people working on it (on
> the thrift mailing list) and feel comfortable that they'll be

Interesting.

> adequately supported in the near future. Feel free to recommend other
> open source alternatives though.

Actually, I was also thinking of ICE for its AMI/AMD feature. I was
just interested to understand the reasons for the Thrift choice. I
don't know enough to make any recommendations. But it is always
interesting to understand the design decisions. Thanks for your quick
response.

Cheers,
Loic.