Does Cloud Foundry support Thrift for talking between apps? I can't find anything about this and it seems REST/HTTP or messaging are the preferred mechanisms for inter-app communication.
Has anyone tried to offer a service using Thrift in CF? Is there any good reason why Thrift is not supported; or are there any plans to support it? I prefer Thrift to REST for cross-language communication because it's easy in Thrift to generate all the client-side classes used in the API calls. Plus it supports binary data transfer and so is potentially faster than REST. Plus we already have a Thrift API:).
I'm guessing that - in theory - a client app could talk directly to another CF app instance running a Thrift service; but then you'd be losing the load-balancing advantages that CF currently provides for HTTP or messaging.
The Cloud Foundry Router currently supports routing of HTTP/HTTPS requests only. There is an effort underway to create a TCP Router to handle routing of non-HTTP traffic to apps running on CF.
There is a video that previews some of the capabilities the TCP Router will provide, and an incubating release that includes the TCP Router if you are deploying your own CF via BOSH.
The cf-dev mailing list would be a good place to ask additional questions about this.
I'm guessing that - in theory - a client app could talk directly to another CF app instance running a Thrift service
This is correct - apps running on CF can talk to each other using any protocol as long as the configured security groups have the proper ports open.