Thrift bindings for Smalltalk
Thrift is a cool project that Facebook open-sourced a few months ago. From their description:
Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler generates code to be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly across programming languages.
It doesn’t try to do too much (serialization of any arbitrary object), but it does more than enough to be useful: it allows reasonably elaborate data-types (like structs and dictionaries) to be transferred; is fast to develop with (no wrapper objects are required); and, with its binary protocol, has very little runtime overhead (Facebook use it for their ad-serving and logging mechanisms). The whitepaper is worth reading.
I recently wrote Smalltalk (Squeak) bindings for Thrift. They’re still a little rough and incompletely tested, but if anyone wants to take them for a spin, I’ve uploaded the patch for Thrift and the supporting Squeak code[1]. To try it out with the standard Thrift tutorial files, generate the Smalltalk code with something like:
$ thrift -r -st tutorial.thrift
Fire up one of the supplied server implementations for the tutorial, file in the generated .st files with Squeak, and then do something like:
calc := CalculatorClient binaryOnHost: 'localhost' port: 9090.
calc addNum1: 10 num2: 15
Which should result in 25 being computed by the server implementation of your choice.
Update (01/11): A more complete patch is now available.
Update (19/11): This code is now in the Thrift SVN repository.
[1] I’ve removed the links since the code is now in Thrift itself.