Setting Up A REST User Sign-In Service

I wanted to document my progress (both success and failures) in setting up a RESTful service to authenticate users and store user preferences in a Hadoop data store. There is will several attempts at this I think because there are already plenty of examples and sample code out there which to try. I know of solutions using Ruby on Rails and Grails. But none that I know of that use Hadoop as the underlying data store.

I started my exercise by choosing a development platform OS. I chose Ubuntu Server because it is free, well supported and it has enterprise cloud support (more on that later). I am using a virtual machine to install Ubuntu using Oracle's VirtualBox.

At first I used the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu Server 10.10. This turned out to be a false start as I had some install issues with Hadoop. Hadoop 0.20 is only supported up to the lucid, 10.04 version of Ubuntu. I found this link to be quite useful in getting me setup correctly. People say Cassandra is better, but I will stick with Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop and HBase for now. I used the "pseudo distributed" package.

So at this point I have Hadoop-0.20 installed on Ubuntu Server 10.04 Enterprise Cloud. My next step is to trial Grails to setup a basic user authentication REST service using Hadoop.