Hello, My name is Srimanth, and am the creator of the Hadoop-Eclipse project (http://people.apache.org/~srimanth/hadoop-eclipse/) released under the Apache License. The project currently provides a HDFS Explorer written on top of Eclipse File System (EFS), and a ZooKeeper Explorer.
During the creation of my project, I was unaware of the parallel creation of the Hadoop Development Tools Incubator project in Apache. I started the project to address some of the deficiencies found in the Eclipse functionality provided in Hadoop at that point. One of them being that the HDFS/MR clients were compiled directly into the plugins - which meant that only one version of the Eclipse plugin could be active at any one point. Basically it was not allowing a client to connect to multiple versions of Hadoop servers. Another was the HDFS functionality provided. Eclipse provides rich file system interaction which was not being utilized. For example, right-clicking on a HDFS file/folder was not showing the regular actions one would find (like new folder file/folder actions). In Hadoop-Eclipse project I rewrote the HDFS functionality on top of EFS so that we get for free all the rich functionality that Eclipse provides, like actions, drag&drop, Team synchronizations, permissions, etc. You can also access HDFS just like any Eclipse project - write scripts, etc. This is like basic functionality which can be easily expanded upon. It is important to note here that supporting new versions of HDFS is as easy as creating a fragment-plugin and extending 1 base class. I have also implemented a ZooKeeper client which provides basic client functionality. This helps in keeping an abstract service oriented view in underlying internals. If the community is interested, I would like join the group as a contributor and contribute my code to the HDT project. I would like to join our efforts to provide better tools in the Hadoop environment. Please let me know of any questions you have regarding functionality, code base, etc. Best regards, Srimanth
