Thanks for the answer. I'm not a Java guy and I didn't know that the Thrift compiler had a 'beans' option. Perhaps I forgot to read the documentation?-)
What I was hoping for is what you've just done: tell them they play kind of OK with a little tweaking. It seems that if I name things right and use the 'beans' option then there is a good chance a lot of the classes/getters/setters will line up and I won't need to write wrappers for the wrappers. Re Swift: I'm just trying to limit the number of technologies I have to learn, and the answers all seemed to have 'server' and 'generate IDL' in them, which are the bits I don't need. As long as what you said goes for the client end, I'm happy to give it a go. I don't really care if the code is 'clean' yet -- just getting something to work would be nice. Regards David M Bennett FACS Andl - A New Database Language - andl.org -----Original Message----- From: BCG [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 11:59 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Does Thrift interoperate with Java beans? On 10/06/2015 01:37 AM, David Bennett wrote: > Thanks for all the helpful responses. > > I tried to make it clear that what I have is a client-only problem. The > server code is unrelated, not causing any problems and not part of this > question. In fact I already have my own IDL generator, so the Swift-related > suggestions are not really all that useful. Swift supports clients as well as servers, so I'm not really sure why you would say the suggestions are not useful just based on that. Perhaps that is besides the point though. > > The question is specifically about how well the Java generated code can be > made to play with bean-ish code on the client side. The context is a desktop > or thick client app with a rich Java UI that is built to interact with bean > code (which in turn has its own persistence or serialisation or communication > layers), and replacing the lower layers with a Thrift API. I fear I'm getting > pushed into creating a bean for each Thrift struct, along with wrappers for > every ctor, getter and setter, and that's not necessarily a place I'd like to > get to. Since beans are fairly common, I wondered if someone had a better > answer. Not trying to beat a dead horse here, just trying to make it clear that this was the question we were trying to answer. Since you already have IDL, you can use Swift's code generator to automatically create beans for all of your structs. You *probably* could use the regular Thrift compiler to do that too with the "beans" option to the Java generator, but Swift's "beans" are much cleaner and closer to what you would expect. That will work well for the structs, so that you don't have to create wrappers for each one. For the services (whether you use Thrift or Swift proper) you will probably need to write some code to bind the client stubs to some underlying Thrift protocol/transport, but that should be straightforward and if you are just using one endpoint that can use TMultiplexedProtocol, most likely could be generic across all of the whole application. tl;dr - you probably could do this with the regular Thrift compiler too, but the use case you are describing is pretty much what Swift seems to be have been designed to do. hth -- Ben > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Stuart Reynolds > Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 11:41 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Does Thrift interoperate with Java beans? > > Kinda. Sorta. > > Vanilla Thrift generates Java data classes that looks pretty beany to me > (they have the standard getters and setters). However, I've always felt that > there's a big downside to giving up control of your server code - not least, > you can't add any additional advanced bean annotations (or any other kind of > annotation) to you classes, nor can you directly serialize third party > classes not produced by Thrift. > This often leads to you wrap the serialization, which kinda defeats many of > the benefits having it automated and had me banging my head on the table in > dispair. > > I've since been using Facebook's Swift project. This lets you > *generate* your thrift IDL from your *existing* server interfaces and bean > classes, but also maintain thirft's extremely efficient serialization (via > runtime class generation). The project has a few design choices I've not a > fan of (export classes but not interfaces, has a HUGE set of dependencies, > most unrelated to serialization), but I've made a fork for scala to allow me > to work around the bigger issues. For me, its been hugely efficient at > letting my export any old interface or data structure with no data marshaling > steps. > > - Stuart > > > > On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 4:37 PM, David Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: >> I have some lumps of code in different languages that I'd like to get to >> talk to each other. The server is OK, but the client code makes heavy use of >> Java beans. >> >> My question, to those who knows a lot more about Java than I do, is whether >> there is some clever way to get Thrift and Java beans to play together, or >> whether this is an invitation to getter/setter hell? >> >> Regards >> David M Bennett FACS >> >> Andl - A New Database Language - andl.org >> >> >
