With Thrift, you predefine both the structure of your data objects and the interfaces you’ll be using to interact with them. The system then generates code to serialize and deserialize the data and stub functions that implement the entry points to your interfaces. It generates efficient code for a wide variety of languages, and under the hood offers a lot of choices for the underlying data format without affecting the application layer.
It has proven to be a popular IDL (Interface Definition Language) for open source infrastructure projects like Cassandra and HDFS. It can feel a bit overwhelming for smaller teams working on lightweight projects, though. Much like statically-typed languages, using a predefined IDL requires investing some time up front in return for strong documentation, future bug prevention, and performance gains. That makes the choice very dependent on the expected lifetime and number of developers on your project.
