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While the HBase Thrift API can be used directly from Python using (automatically generated) HBase Thrift service classes, application code doing so is very verbose, cumbersome to write, and hence error-prone. The reason for this is that the HBase Thrift API is a flat, language-agnostic interface API closely tied to the RPC going over the wire-level protocol. In practice, this means that applications using Thrift directly need to deal with many imports, sockets, transports, protocols, clients, Thrift types and mutation objects. For instance, look at the code required to connect to HBase and store two values:
from thrift import Thrift
from thrift.transport import TSocket, TTransport
from thrift.protocol import TBinaryProtocol
from hbase import ttypes
from hbase.Hbase import Client, Mutation
sock = TSocket.TSocket('hostname', 9090)
transport = TTransport.TBufferedTransport(sock)
protocol = TBinaryProtocol.TBinaryProtocol(transport)
client = Client(protocol)
transport.open()
mutations = [Mutation(column='family:qual1', value='value1'),
Mutation(column='family:qual2', value='value2')]
client.mutateRow('table-name', 'row-key', mutations)
PEP 20 taught us that simple is better than complex, and as you can see, Thrift is certainly complex. HappyBase hides all the Thrift cruft below a friendly API. The resulting application code will be cleaner, more productive to write, and more maintainable. With HappyBase, the example above can be simplified to this:
import happybase
connection = happybase.Connection('hostname')
table = connection.table('table-name')
table.put('row-key', {'family:qual1': 'value1',
'family:qual2': 'value2'})
If you’re not convinced and still think the Thrift API is not that bad, please try to accomplish some other common tasks, e.g. retrieving rows and scanning over a part of a table, and compare that to the HappyBase equivalents. If you’re still not convinced by then, we’re sorry to inform you that HappyBase is not the project for you, and we wish you all of luck maintaining your code ‒ or is it just Thrift boilerplate?