I implemented bi-directional support in thrift about 9 years ago, see THRIFT-66. It was for a company I was working at, and it was only for C#.
This project never picked it up, but the general idea is that instead of having a Client and a Server, each end would be an Endpoint, and each end was free to register a handler for a service, and each end was free to make client requests. In that model, the Client and Server are only used to establish who is listening and who is connecting; and it eliminates the current requirement that the party that connects is the only one who can issue requests. This generally worked quite well in C# and is in use in production code at a major firm, however it never made its way into the rest of thrift. It's unlikely I will have the time to do it in the foreseeable future, but that's the general idea of it. The file in THRIFT-66 called ThriftCSharpEndpointsChannels.zip did this, along with adding support for multiplexed services before they became what they are today, so I would suggest if you are going to look at that implementation that you mostly ignore the "channels" and focus on the Endpoint implementation. I believe that implementation also provided certificate authentication to the C# layer at the time which was also missing, it's a bunch of stuff rolled into one... - Jim On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 9:14 AM C Bergström <cbergst...@pathscale.com> wrote: > > Hah! I'm in need of exactly this and I may have some working Python > code soon I can share (maybe). To be fair I'm porting really really > messy C# implementation over to Python and the C# version *IS* working > bi-directional. (So it should be possible, right?) By this I mean that > the client logs in and establishes a connection and the local "server" > is able listen and reply using that same connection. (You'd think this > use case of client logging in and stuff would be super common) > > I'll watch this thread and post code if nobody else jumps in and gives > more concrete details sooner. > > Good luck :D > > On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 9:08 PM Dams <d...@nolyann.ch> wrote: > > > > Hello, > > > > In the enterprise where I work, I evaluated Thrift. I didn’t know it before > > and am new to RPC and network contexts. I’m seduced by the quality of its > > architecture and of the C++ code! Great work! > > > > But we have a special need: not only the client/server communication for a > > test system, but also a bidirectional communication, for applications > > running in the same environment. Thrift does not provide this second > > possibility if I’m not wrong. I found this example: > > https://github.com/JoelPM/BidiThrift described here: > > http://joelpm.com/2009/04/03/thrift-bidirectional-async-rpc.html. It is > > relatively old: 2009. > > > > My questions: > > * Why doesn’t Thrift provide this possibility of bidirectional > > communication? > > * What do you think about this example? As far as I can understand, it > > seems to be well designed. > > * Do you intend to plan such a possibility? > > > > Thanks in advance for your answers. > > Dams
