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  1. Stackups
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  5. Akka vs Apache Thrift

Akka vs Apache Thrift

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Akka
Akka
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.0K
Votes88
Apache Thrift
Apache Thrift
Stacks193
Followers245
Votes0
GitHub Stars10.8K
Forks4.1K

Akka vs Apache Thrift: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the world of distributed systems, Akka and Apache Thrift are popular frameworks that help in building scalable and resilient applications. Each framework has its unique features and use cases that differentiate them from one another.

  1. Concurrency Model: Akka is built on the Actor Model, making it inherently concurrent by design. Actors are independent units of computation that communicate by passing messages. In contrast, Apache Thrift does not have built-in support for actors. It focuses more on defining and creating service interfaces for multiple languages.

  2. Communication Protocol: Apache Thrift is primarily a communication protocol and serialization framework used for defining and creating remote services. It provides a language-agnostic way to define and communicate APIs between services. On the other hand, Akka is not just a communication framework but a full-fledged toolkit for building distributed systems with built-in support for message passing and fault tolerance.

  3. Language Support: Apache Thrift supports multiple programming languages like C++, Java, Python, and more, allowing different services to communicate seamlessly regardless of the language they are written in. Akka, on the other hand, is primarily built for the JVM ecosystem, with strong support for languages like Java and Scala.

  4. Fault Tolerance: Akka provides built-in support for fault tolerance through supervision strategies and actor supervision hierarchies. This enables actors to recover from failures and errors gracefully. While fault tolerance can be implemented in Apache Thrift-based systems, it requires additional custom implementation and is not inherent to the framework.

  5. Scalability: Akka is known for its scalability, allowing developers to create highly responsive and elastic applications. It achieves this through its decentralized and non-blocking nature, making it suitable for high-throughput systems. Apache Thrift, while capable of handling high loads, does not offer the same level of built-in scalability features as Akka.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Akka has a vibrant community and ecosystem with various tools, libraries, and frameworks that complement its features. It's widely used in industries like finance, gaming, and telecommunications. Apache Thrift also has a strong community backing, especially within the Apache Software Foundation, providing support and updates for the framework. However, the scope of the ecosystem may be more limited compared to Akka due to its focus on communication protocols and serialization.

In Summary, Akka and Apache Thrift differ in terms of concurrency model, communication protocol, language support, fault tolerance, scalability, and community ecosystem, each catering to specific needs and use cases in the realm of distributed systems.

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Detailed Comparison

Akka
Akka
Apache Thrift
Apache Thrift

Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.

The Apache Thrift software framework, for scalable cross-language services development, combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml and Delphi and other languages.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
10.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
4.1K
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
193
Followers
1.0K
Followers
245
Votes
88
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 32
    Great concurrency model
  • 17
    Fast
  • 12
    Actor Library
  • 10
    Open source
  • 7
    Resilient
Cons
  • 3
    Mixing futures with Akka tell is difficult
  • 2
    Closing of futures
  • 2
    No type safety
  • 1
    Very difficult to refactor
  • 1
    Typed actors still not stable
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Akka, Apache Thrift?

Orleans

Orleans

Orleans is a framework that provides a straightforward approach to building distributed high-scale computing applications, without the need to learn and apply complex concurrency or other scaling patterns. It was created by Microsoft Research and designed for use in the cloud.

RxJS

RxJS

RxJS is a library for reactive programming using Observables, to make it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code. This project is a rewrite of Reactive-Extensions/RxJS with better performance, better modularity, better debuggable call stacks, while staying mostly backwards compatible, with some breaking changes that reduce the API surface.

Netty

Netty

Netty is a NIO client server framework which enables quick and easy development of network applications such as protocol servers and clients. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.

Finagle

Finagle

Finagle is an extensible RPC system for the JVM, used to construct high-concurrency servers. Finagle implements uniform client and server APIs for several protocols, and is designed for high performance and concurrency.

MessagePack

MessagePack

It is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it's faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves.

Protobuf

Protobuf

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.

Avro

Avro

It is a row-oriented remote procedure call and data serialization framework developed within Apache's Hadoop project. It uses JSON for defining data types and protocols, and serializes data in a compact binary format.

Tokio

Tokio

It is an open source library providing an asynchronous, event driven platform for building fast, reliable, and lightweight network applications. It leverages Rust's ownership and concurrency model to ensure thread safety.

Serde

Serde

It is a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically. The ecosystem consists of data structures that know how to serialize and deserialize themselves along with data formats that know how to serialize and deserialize other things. It provides the layer by which these two groups interact with each other, allowing any supported data structure to be serialized and deserialized using any supported data format.

Redux Observable

Redux Observable

It allows developers to dispatch a function that returns an observable, promise or iterable of action(s). Compose and cancel async actions to create side effects and more.

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