Apache Thrift is an open source framework to build scalable cross-language services. It was originally developed by Facebook, then entered the Apache Incubator around May 2008. Simplicity, transparency, consistency, and performance are the four key values behind the framework.
Unlike the REST and SOAP type of services, Thrift services use a binary form of communication. Luckily for us, Thrift provides a code generation engine to get us started. The code generation engine can pick up any interface definition language (IDL) file and generate PHP or other language bindings from it.
Before we start writing our first service definition, we need to install Apache Thrift.