Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to integrate some existing Thrift objects into an Avro-generated object, and haven't been able to find any pointers in the docs - as background, the project in question has recently adopted Avro as a new serialization standard, however there is still quite a bit of legacy code (and data) which uses Thrift, so the hope is that we can package a fairly small Thrift object in as a field on an AVDL-generated Avro object. I came across the org.apache.avro.thrift package (http://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.1/api/java/org/apache/avro/thrift/package-summary.html) and see that reading and writing of Thrift objects is supported (as well as the test which shows it in action at http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/avro/tags/release-1.7.1/lang/java/thrift/src/test/java/org/apache/avro/thrift/TestThrift.java?view=markup), however it's unclear to me if (or how) I can point at a Thrift object within an AVDL.
Assuming that this AVDL embedding isn't possible (something tells me that ThriftDatum[Reader|Writer] being based off of GenericDatumReader means it's only meant for runtime use, and not as part of AVDL compilation), what would you recommend as the best approach towards achieving this? It would be possible to duplicate the Thrift object's schema in AVDL and create a second AVDL-based version of that object, but would there be a clean way to convert back and forth between the two representations without needing to add a bunch of extra code? The existing legacy code *really* wants a Thrift object, so I need to somehow get from the Avro object to that, preferably in the cleanest way possible - any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ryan Slobojan
