Guys, I've been looking into some service scripting around HBase lifecycle management, etc. and couldn't help but wonder why those were written in Ruby of all JVM languages? Historical legacy aside, it seems that current HBase is still using JRuby 1.6.5 vs the latest at 1.9+ or perhaps even later.
At any rate, I was wondering if replacing Ruby with a more Java-like scripting extension (if the scripting-2-Java API bridge is what indeed desired) would be of any interest here? An obvious choice would be Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/). One of the main reasons behind my proposal is stack simplification: Bigtop is very actively using Groovy as a scripting language of choice to do builds, develop smoke tests, etc. So, it is already there and guaranteed to be installed as a part of any Bigtop-derived Hadoop distro. There are other benefits, where, if desired, one can just write Java code inside of a Groovy script, without a need to learn yet another language like Ruby. This is perhaps not of an immediate priority for the community, but if there's enough interest, I can give it an initial shot to demo'ed what I am really talking about. Thoughts? -- Regards, Cos
