This directory contains some glue code to allow Thrift RPCs to be sent over ZeroMQ. Included are client and server implementations for Python and C++, along with a simple demo interface (with a working client and server for each language).

Thrift was designed for stream-based interfaces like TCP, but ZeroMQ is message-based, so there is a small impedance mismatch. Most of issues are hidden from developers, but one cannot be: oneway methods have to be handled differently from normal ones. ZeroMQ requires the messaging pattern to be declared at socket creation time, so an application cannot decide on a message-by-message basis whether to send a reply. Therefore, this implementation makes it the client's responsibility to ensure that ZMQ_REQ sockets are used for normal methods and ZMQ_DOWNSTREAM sockets are used for oneway methods. In addition, services that expose both types of methods have to expose two servers (on two ports), but the TZmqMultiServer makes it easy to run the two together in the same thread.

This code was tested with ZeroMQ 2.0.7 and pyzmq afabbb5b9bd3.

To build, simply install Thrift and ZeroMQ, then run “make”. If you install in a non-standard location, make sure to set THRIFT to the location of the Thrift code generator on the make command line and PKG_CONFIG_PATH to a path that includes the pkgconfig files for both Thrift and ZeroMQ. The test servers take no arguments. Run the test clients with no arguments to retrieve the stored value or with an integer argument to increment it by that amount.

This code is not quite what I would consider production-ready. It doesn't support all of the normal hooks into Thrift, and its performance is sub-optimal because it does some unnecessary copying.

Deprecation notice: Csharp is not a supported Apache Thrift target anymore. Instead netstd is the recommended replacement. This code is left “as is” for educational purposes unless someone converts it to netstd