Terminology

As you navigate our documentation, you may encounter terms you’re unfamiliar with, or that have different meanings in this context than in others. We’ve gathered a number of those terms and provided definitions for them here, so we’re all on the same page:

Term	Definition
API (Application Programming Interface)	A program-to-program interface that allows one application to request information or tasks of another. When you create a Thriftly API, you’re allowing outside programs to make requests of and retrieve information from your existing Windows application(s).
Application Pool	When you deploy your Thriftly-enabled application, Thriftly creates multiple pools of application processes, deploying multiple copies of your application on the Thriftly Server at once. This allows your application’s APIs to handle many concurrent calls at once, without requiring multiple endpoints.
Encoding	A system used to transform, translate, and process information passed to and from your APIs. Thriftly supports using the UTF-8 and ANSI character encoding methods to transmit information to and from your application(s).
Endpoint	The unique combination of IP address, port, and name at which Thriftly exposes your application and services (APIs). This endpoint is used to create your application’s endpoint URL.
Endpoint URL	The specific URL at which your application is exposed, either locally or over the internet. If you deploy your application using the Thriftly Server and Gateways, your endpoint URL is made available publicly (over the internet) and is available to outside developers. If you deploy your application locally, your URL is available on only your local machine or network.
JSON Web Token (JWT)	JWTs are an open standard authorization method you can integrate into your Thriftly APIs, allowing you to control what functions users can access when calling your APIs. JWTs are compact and self-contained, circumventing the need for your server to route API calls through an authorization layer.
Port	The server port at which Thriftly makes your application’s endpoint and API-enabled services available. When you deploy your APIs over the Thriftly Server, you must assign a unique port to each endpoint you deploy.
Protocol	A set of standards that allows applications written in different programming languages to communicate with each other via APIs. A variety of protocols exist, including JSON-RPC, JSON-REST, SOAP, Thrift (Binary and Compact), and gRPC. Thriftly allows you to serve APIs using multiple protocols at the same time, allowing easy connections to different applications.
Service	A logical grouping of functions within your application, which Thriftly translates into an API. Your existing Windows application likely already includes a variety of services that group functions you want to make available to outside applications. For example, your application might include a Customers service that contains the functions used to update and maintain your customer database. With Thriftly, you can transform this service into an API, allowing outside developers to call into, retrieve information from, and update your customer database over the web.
Service URL	The URL at which you or your developers can actually connect to and call the Thriftly API created from your service(s). A service URL provides access to the functions grouped within that service.
Thriftly Configurator	The application you use to configure and deploy your Thriftly APIs (as described in the Configuring and Deploying Your APIs section).
Thriftly Gateways	A series of geographically distributed API gateways that allow you to connect to your API from anywhere on the globe. When you serve your API through a Thriftly Gateway, you provide easy, secure, and quick access to the functions contained within your existing application.
Thriftly Server	Our own secure internet server, on which we host and publish your Thriftly APIs. When you serve your API over the Thriftly Server (and Gateways), you allow your own or outside developers to connect to your API without having to reconfigure your firewall or worry about hosting and security.
Transport	The method used to transmit information to and from your API over the internet. In most cases, you’ll serve your APIs using the HTTP (or Hypertext Transfer Protocol) transport, but Thriftly also supports the Framed transport.