Thrift is Facebook’s cross-language data-exchange and RPC library, similar to Google’s Protocol Buffers. In my opinion, it also seems to be better (supports more data structures and programming languages) than Protocol Buffers. Unfortunately, its documentation isn’t very comprehensive, and many people have trouble getting it to work. In Ubuntu/Debian Linux, besides the requirements on the official homepage, you need the following packages to compile Thrift:
libboost-dev
python-dev
ruby1.8-dev
byacc
flex
Hopefully after thrift comes out of the Apache Incubator, the documentation would be more complete.