Thrift is Facebook’s BSD/MIT-derived-licensed cross-language RPC framework that’s lighter than SOAP, CORBA and others. From the website:
Thrift is a 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 we are now releasing it as open source.
