Support for Thrift Types about happybase

[wbolster]

Well, Thrift types are of little use here. Thrift types are only used in the underlying Thrift API. Any data stored in HBase is defined as a binary string in that API, so this should really be taken care of in the application. You can use any data serialisation format you like, including strings created with struct, JSON, MessagePack, Protocol Buffers, or anything you might come up with.

[budlight]

thrift is both an rpc protocol and a serialization format, so you could also serialize to thrift, seems like since the thrift serialization is going to be invoked anyway (even if just to a byte string) you might as well consider it as the actual serialization format if you are concerned about performance. I guess the other option might be write protocol buffers since it does seem like hbase is slowly moving towards using them internally and there might be a standard rpc format for protocol buffers. The second option basically depends on using this library as a temporary stop-gap in my opinion though.

[wbolster]

It does not really matter that Thrift is used in the underlying protocol. The actual data is sent as a simple byte string anyway. But indeed, one can also use Thrift instead of the other formats I mentioned in my previous comment.

[wbolster]

I'm closing this since HappyBase does not dictate how an application should store its data.