Greetings Thrift devs
I've been working on a Thrift protocol implementation on top of XML, and
I would like to get some feedback from you if you have a chance to take
a look at my work.
I know mixing Thrift and XML is probably anathema to some but I see some
important benefits for interoperability, especially in the "enterprise"
world.
In short, I've designed an XML format that can be consumed by a
streaming XML parser in a manner consistent with Thrift semantics, and a
reference implementation in Java is completed (linked below).
I've also started work on some XSL transformations to convert from the
streaming format to more "standard" XML formats like SOAP web services
etc. There is of course performance overhead with this but I think it
might provide a good migration path to the "native" thrift formats in
many cases - "a foot in the door" if you will. Frankly I'm not an XSL
expert but in my thinking, if you all like this protocol, doing these
transformations with XSL should make the amount of effort to implement
in languages smaller (languages would only need to implement the
streaming protocol, in other words).
My intention is to contribute the results of this effort to the Thrift
project if you all like it and find it useful. Before doing that
however I would like to know if there are ways in which this format
could be improved, or if I am barking up the wrong tree. If you are
able to review my work, your time in doing so as well as your feedback
is definitely appreciated.
Please find my project here and a more detailed write-up here:
https://github.com/bgould/thrift-xml-protocol
Thank you
Ben
