First Steps of Apache Thrift with Java in Linux

Apache Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It was originally developed by Facebook before it was donated to Apache Software Foundation.  

Download the stable release

Unpack the tar.gz archive to a directory you prefer
(say home /home/amila/apacheThrift)

tar -xvzf thrift-0.8.0.tar.gz

You need JDK and Apache Ant at least to run Thrift's Java tutorial.
(You can refer to my previous posts to find how to install JDK on ubuntu.)

Use apt-get to install Ant

sudo apt-get install ant
 

We first need to install Thrift compiler and language variables before we start developing we Thrift.

There are several required packages to install Thrift that are not installed on a linux distribution by default.
To install those

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-program-options-dev libevent-dev automake libtool flex bison pkg-config g++ libssl-dev 
 

Goto top level directory of unpacked thrift distribution
(eg: /home/amila/apacheThrift/thrift-0.8.0)

./configure
 

During this process, thrift will scan and list the different language found.
It should say:

Building Java Library ........ : yes
Using javac .................. : javac
Using java ................... : java
Using ant .................... : /usr/bin/ant

..along with other languages found on your computer.

However, to configure Thrift for all those languages, you may need to install additional packages

Now you can make Thrift:

make
 

You might get some error if all required libraries for the languages configured in above step are not present.

In that case, you can deselect the packages you don't need when configuring
For example, say you don't need the support for Ruby. When configuring, you can use:

./configure --without-ruby
 

(I had to deselect erlang libraries to get it working on ubuntu 11.04)

After make is completed successfully, install Thrift by,

sudo make install
 

To check if the installation is successfully completed:

thift
 

You should get an output like:

Usage: thrift [options] file
Options:
  -version    Print the compiler version
  -o dir      Set the output directory for gen-* packages
               (default: current directory)
  -out dir    Set the ouput location for generated files
.........
.........
 

Tutorial are located at ./tutorials directory.

There you will find two files tutorials.thrift and shared.thrift

.thrift files describe the interfaces (IDL) in terms of the classes, methods they include.

thrift -r -gen java tutorial.thrift
 

This will create a directory named "gen-java" inside your current directory which will include generated Java classes according to specified thrift file.

Now goto the directory "java" inside the current directory (tutorial) and execute ant.
The ant script will compile both generated source files and the source file inside java directory and build a jar file.

Finally, run the tutorial by:

thrift/tutorial/java$ ./JavaServer
thrift/tutorial/java$ ./JavaClient
 

You may also find this page useful.