Apache Thrift Ant Task

Thrift-task is an native(ish) cross-platform Ant task for the Apache Thrift project. It also includes a full Java implementation of thrift than can be used from the command line.

Usage

1. Put thrift-task-0.0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar into your project directory.
2. Define the task in your build file, setting classpath to the relative path to the jar:

<taskdef name="thrift" classname="com.nsegment.thrift.ThriftTask" classpath="thrift-task-0.0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar" />

1. Now add a task to your build file:

<thrift srcdir="." includes="**/*.thrift" destdir="bin" java="" />

1. This task will build all .thrift files in the project directory and drop off .java files in bin/gen-java

To run thrift as a standalone process (not from Ant), do

java -jar thrift-task-0.0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar -help
# or
java -cp thrift-task-0.0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar com.nsegment.thrift.Thriftc -help

Windows users using thrift-task outside of Ant should use absolute paths like /c:/Path/to/file.thrift. Directory separators are forward slashes, a leading forward slash is added before the drive letter, and the drive letter is lower-case. When using the Ant task, this conversion is handled for you.

Usage details

Thrift-task is a MatchingTask, so it supports filesets, includes, and excludes like <javac />.

--gen flags are passed as attributes to the task, and their options are comma-separated attribute values:

<thrift srcdir="." includes="**/*.thrift" destdir="bin" java="hashcode,include_prefix" />

The following boolean flags are supported:

• nowarn
• strict
• verbose
• recurse
• debug
• allowNegKeys
• allow64bitConsts
• quiet
• A thrift-task addition, quiet="true" will discard all output, regardless of the settings of other flags

The following languages and options are supported and behave the same as those in the the compiled thrift command:

• as3 (bindable)
• c_glib
• cocoa (log_unexpected, validate_required)
• cpp (cob_style, no_client_completion, no_default_operators, templates, pure_enums, dense, include_prefix)
• csharp (async, asyncctp, wcf, serial, nullable, hashcode, union)
• d
• delphi (ansistr_binary, register_types, constprefix, events, xmldoc)
• erl (legacynames)
• go (package_prefix, thrift_import, package)
• hs
• html (standalone)
• java (beans, private-members, nocamel, fullcamel, android, android_legacy, java5, reuse-objects, sorted_containers)
• javame
• js (jquery, node, ts)
• json
• lua
• ocaml
• perl
• php (inlined, server, oop, rest, nsglobal=NAME, validate, json)
• py (new_style, twisted, tornado, utf8strings, slots, dynamic, dynbase=CLS, dynexc=CLS, dynimport='from foo.bar import CLS')
• rb (rubygems, namespaced)
• st
• xsd

Implementation details

Rather than being a native Java implementation, thrift-task uses code translated from a MIPS build of thrift to Java byte code by the NestedVM project and a modified Unix runtime. It's essentially emulated MIPS code, but in a compiled form. While it's noticeably slower than a native executable or native Java code, it's far easier to perfectly match existing behavior or change behavior to match a specific build.

The process for building the emulated class blob is documented in toolchain. Once built, jars just need to be copied to repo, and pom.xml modified to relfect the new versions.

Limitations

• It's a little slow, but tolerable. This is because the code is emulated.
• It doesn't detect if source files need to be rebuilt, so it always rebuilds. Part of the reason is detecting modification times requires parsing the file to find its includes.