Facebook released Thrift, an open source software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and have been just released as open source.

Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler generates code that can be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly across programming languages.

Facebook is using Thrift in many of their services such Search, logging, mobile and ads, and it helped application developers to focus on the application code without worrying about the socket layer. You can download Thrift and read the Read the Thrift Whitepaper for more details on the implementation.