I first met Randy on the Apache Thrift mailing lists, where we both grew from contributing enthusiasts to committers and finally to PMC members of the Apache Thrift project. Later on I met him a few times in person, and we formed a bond—the kind many programmers are familiar with—while working on a piece of open source software across two continents.
Isn’t it funny how that works? At the same time there are heavy conflicts in certain areas of the world, countless open source projects are bringing people together, to communicate freely and build bridges—across oceans, across continents, and across cultures. And if there is any Apache project that best fits this picture of communication and connections, it’s probably Apache Thrift.
When I became aware of Apache Thrift for the first time, I quickly realized its potential. This RPC and serialization framework is a powerful and enabling technology. It’s easy to use and extremely flexible, and it supports a wide range of target languages and dialects—more than 20 at the time of this writing. Besides establishing connections across languages, Thrift also supports the application developer by crossing platform boundaries.