Thryft: a code generation framework for multilingual web application development

Summary

Thryft accepts Apache Thrift interface definitions and generates:

• Java immutable models, service interfaces, abstract service stubs, unit test templates, logging service wrappers, and REST and JSON-RPC servlet bridges to services
• Python models and JSON-RPC service clients
• Backbone.js models and jQuery .ajax service clients

Thryft is written in Python using a SPARK parser and syntax-directed translation.

Thryft does not share any code with Apache Thrift, and it is not intended to be a complete rewrite of the latter. Among other things, Thryft does not currently a number of secondary IDL features such as senums. Thryft's runtime library is also quite different from Apache Thrift's and e.g., does not support field numbering.

Thryft does have a number of features that are not present in Apache Thrift:

• Support for additional "native" types using custom, dynamically-loaded code generators:
  • URLs
  • email addresses
  • BigDecimals
  • datetimes
• Annotations in Javadoc-style comments that can generate:
  • Javadoc on Java models and services
  • Shiro @Requires annotations
  • Faker.js-compatible calls
  • Jsdoc
  • Backbone.Forms and Backbone.Validation properties
• A Java runtime library that provides:
  • Model marshalling protocols: CSV; JSON; string maps
  • Model stores: file system; JDBC; memory; Redis; S3; SimpleDB; DynamoDB

Installation

    git clone git://github.com/minorg/thryft.git

Usage

The command line interface is similar to Apache Thrift's:

    python thryft/compiler/bin/thryft -h

However, it's generally easier to write a simple Python script that uses the generators as a library. An example script that generates test code can be found in

    thryft/lib/thrift/devbin/generate_src.py

License

2-clause BSD