Summary

Throughout this chapter, we took a look at two of the most common and well-established web services: SOAP and REST. We also looked into a rising new star called Apache Thrift. Once we pass the barrier of initial Apache Thrift installation and setup, features such as simplicity, scalability, speed, and portability certainly come into focus. As we saw in our client example, the RPC calls can easily be implemented with a central code repository--the thrift-service/gen-php/ directory in our case.

While Apache Thrift has yet to catch up in terms of popularity, the fact that it is being used by the likes of Facebook, Evernote, Pinterest, Quora, Uber, and other well-known names, certainly speaks for itself. This is not to say that future-wise SOAP or REST are less important. Choosing the right type of service is a matter of careful planning and forward thinking.

Finally, we glossed over some of the key points of an emerging a new architectural style called microservices.

Moving forward, we...