I came across this via Oisín Hurley’s Blog.

Facebook have released a new framework to allow languages to talk with each other. This is how Facebook describe Thrift:

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.

As Oisín points out, this sounds very like CORBA. I worked with CORBA a few years back when we needed to provide a interface between C++ applications and a Java based configuration server. I am very interested to see what Thrift is providing that CORBA is not? It may be a case of reinventing the wheel with a nice Web 2.0 spin on it.

If I am way off the mark here and Thrift is bringing something new to the table, let me know.