After an year of some rigorous MapReduce coding and customizing a lot of hadoop classes, InputFormat, RecordReader, Partitioner, Comparator, Writables etc, we heard about Cascading, found it intriguing and thought of give it a try. Initially it took a bit time specially when a have thought of every thing as a key value pair for long and now you have to think in in terms of taps, sinks pipes and flow.
After a while, we were amazed by cascading in built support and decided to use it in production. Our Code base is much shorter and simpler now. Now no more customization of classes. Application building & testing time decreased significantly.
So Dear MapReduce programmer, what are you waiting for .. time to switch to cascading.
http://www.cascading.org/
http://www.cascading.org/documentation/
http://hortonworks.com/blog/cascading-hadoop-big-data-whatever/
:) Happy Cascading
