I am getting myself a bit confused about how to go about this. My plan is to use PHP to perform the final page construction and this PHP web app will contact multiple services, which i will also to develop, for the data. Lets say one of those services was done in Java. I would define a Java interface which was implemented by a concrete class. This is where I get confused - how does Thrift link the PHP web app with the java service or am I getting totally mixed up??
Thanks
Thrift is based on the use of an IDL (Interface Definition Language). Using the definition from Wikipedia:
An interface description language (or alternately, interface definition language), or IDL for short, is a specification language used to describe a software component's interface. IDLs describe an interface in a language-neutral way, enabling communication between software components that do not share a language – for example, between components written in C++ and components written in Java.
An example on how to use the Thrift interface language is available in the Thrift tutorial.
By the use of a .thrift file, you're suppose to define the interfaces you need (in terms of types and services). For example, in your .thrift file, you could define a simple function like:
i32 add(1:i32 num1, 2:i32 num2)
that represents a function to sum two integers.
When you're ready with your .thrift file, you can generate the Java, PHP, Erlang, whatever code that you need (server-side or client-side), using the Thrift generator.
Refer to the Thrift wiki for more information.
I would be very curious to see benchmarks between Thrift and PHP / Java bridge http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/pjb/. By heart i would advocate Thrift but i have doubts it is as fast as php/java bridge.