Gavin E Nunns

Just a short rant about user alerts and notifications in software applications…..

1st – If you are going to alert the user about something even remotely important, please make the alert obvious!

An alert is NOT the time to show off how smooth and seamless you can subtly slide a line of text on to the screen. If the use needs to know LET THEM KNOW.  Users very rarely want to lock their password or order 3 flights too many to Puerto Rico.

2nd – The only thing more irritating than a subtle user notification..

..is no notification or indication of any kind that something is happening.  With all the frameworks available to help hold our hands through the creation of nicely layered modular code there is no excuse to have a blocking operation prevent a simple notification update that something is indeed going on.

OK rant off!

I”m not talking about the rental car or about saving money through the cunning use of 2nd hand clothes stores (that”s another blog in its own right!).

This post is about Thrift.

So what is Thrift? Its very cool, and I”m amazed at how few people know anything about it when most people use it every day often many times a day!  Thrift is a lite weight language agnostic, platform independent object broker framework.  It was developed and used extensively to support the multitude of applications infecting browsers everywhere via the popular social media network Facebook.

At its core thrift is web service code generator that supports C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml and Delphi among other languages.  Its also very easy to use, you simply author a .thrift definition file like the following example I borrowed from the thrift website.

struct UserProfile { 

1: i32 uid, 

2: string name, 

3: string blurb 

} 

service UserStorage { 

void store(1: UserProfile user), 

UserProfile retrieve(1: i32 uid) 

}

Then bring up your console and generate the code for what ever languages your client and server service needs to support.

thrift –gen <language> <Thrift filename>

Its now a simple matter of wrapping or populating the guts of what you wish to achieve with your service and its client sides.  Include the required supporting thrift files and then a compile here and a compile over there and BOOM a fully working service that can be easily extended to work with clients that sit on a plethora of different platforms and software environments.