Rails Sample App Status

I got the sample rails movie application running and am now working on integrating the restful-authentication plugin from technoweenie on github.

Setting up proxy to pull the source from Git was somewhat of a pain though, git config --global http.proxy user:pw@hostname:port is your friend in this case.

1st Baby Step Toward RESTful Authentication

Installed rails today and going to work through the "Getting Started With Restful Authentication in Rails" tutorial.

Installing rails on Ubuntu is brain dead simple:

sudo apt-get install rails

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.