[THRIFT-518] as3/flash/flex generator

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.3
• Patch Info: Patch Available
• Assignee: Aron Sogor
• Reporter: Dave Lerman
• Created: 27/May/09 15:23
• Updated: 22/Apr/10 21:19
• Resolved: 22/Apr/10 21:19

Description

There's been various mailing list discussions about ActionScript 3 support, but I didn't see an associated JIRA so I thought I'd create one.

The goal would be to allow a Flash or Flex project to call a Thrift service as an alternative to Flash's built-in web services and RPC implementations. A developer might want to use Thrift instead of SOAP, REST or AMF for it's code generation, strong typing, or for interoperability with existing Thrift-based services.

The Flash code would look something like:

public function testFunction() {
  var client:Service = new ServiceImpl(new TBinaryProtocol(
         new THttpClient(new URLRequest("http://service.com")));
  client.ping("hello world", handlePingResponse);
}      

private function handlePingResponse(response:String):void {
  trace("RESPONSE: " + response);
}

where Service is the generated Flash interface, ServiceImpl is the generated client which implements Service, and THttpClient is an implementation of TTransport.

Note that Flash is a single-threaded environment so the call is necessarily asynchronous.

The attached patch is a first-pass at an implementation. It's basically a line-for-line partial port of the java lib and generator. The lib contains a single protocol (TBinaryProtocol) and a single transport (THttpClient), along with a generator which generates the interface and client implementation (server implementation is skipped since this seems unlikely to be useful). It still needs some work – it's untested except for the specific thrift services we use internally, and needs documentation and cleanup. I'm happy to do this work if there's general interest in adding as3 support - let me know.