Hadoop workshop : First success story

We completed our first hadoop workshop on 20th August with great success . This post summarizes some of the insights and feedback we got from the event.

People love to learn a new hot technology in market. So many people are interested to learn Hadoop but they just did not have the right place to start. I think our workshop gave them the right platform to kick start in hadoop. We sold all our 17 tickets to the event within few days. So we even sold out next workshop tickets and the third workshop tickets are already selling . Yeah! its on fire.. We are doing small workshops to get the feedback and improve the overall experience.

Out of 17 , twelve people attended the workshop. Participants thoroughly enjoyed the interactive sessions and expressed that the hands on were great . The hands on went as planned which gave the participants an insight to hadoop and map/reduce .Putting in their own words,the following is what the people expressed....

“Great work by small company having effective people...Impressed! I want to have the same training once again” -Vijesh
“Good and Interactive sessions delivered.Nice job by Madhu and company” -Devang Gandhi
"Hands-on trainings were good" -Uma Mahewari
"Content delivery was very good" -Puneetha

With this kind of positive response we are charged to host more workshops. We sold out few tickets for students which is a student centric workshop on 27th Aug . People already signing up for our third workshop . So if you are interested you can register here http://hadoopworkshopsept.eventbrite.com/  asap , since we are sure that we are going to sell out that soon.

We are also launching advanced trainings particularly for the workshop attendees which gives opportunities them to go deep into Hadoop and start their carrier as a Hadoop developer .If you know hadoop and if you want to know more this will be a great opportunity.

So overall it was a great experience and it gave the feeling that we are in a right path.
If you are interested in Hadoop and its ecosystem meet us at any of the above events. We can assure you that it would be a great experience for you.

Using ANTLR with maven

As a part of Nectar, we are trying to build a custom language using ANTLR. Since our project uses maven during the build time, we have to integrate ANTLR with maven. Though ANTLR provides maven plug-in, its little tricky to use. So, in this post I am explaining the steps to integrate ANTLR with maven using ANTLR3 maven plug in.

Step 1 :  You have to put all your grammar files , aka .g files in the default directory required by the plugin. Custom placing will not work because of some bug in the plugin. Hence, place the .g file in the following manner:

src/main/antlr3/<required-package>/.g

So the <required-package> is the package you specified in the .g file.

Step 2 :  Add the plug-in to the pom as follows:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.antlr</groupId>
<artifactId>antlr3-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.1.3-1</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<configuration>
    <outputDirectory>src/main/java</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
<goals>
      <goal>antlr</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

We added a configuration which generates the lexer and parser files in the src directory rather than  the default generated source in target.

For more information about the plug-in, refer here

Step 3: Just run the pom and your .g will be compiled successfully.

One day Hadoop Workshop in Bangalore

After releasing Nectar, our open source analytics framework, we got a positive feedback and many of them wanted to know more about how we use hadoop in our company and get started with the hadoop development. So, we thought that a workshop on Hadoop would be great idea.

Thus, we have arranged a workshop about Hadoop on 20th August ,2011 held at Bangalore. In the workshop, we have scheduled events as how we are using hadoop to build our own analytics products and about Nectar.We are also going to talk about how you can use Hadoop in your organization. We will be having hands on experience for the attendees in the labs to setup the hadoop cluster,running map/reduce jobs etc.For more details about the event , refer this page.

Hadoop and small things

As you know Hadoop always wants to play with Big Data . It doesn’t like small files. Initially, we  thought we are going to have workshop for 10 people and the tickets were made free. But within 12 hours, all the tickets were sold out !!!  Now, we have a workshop for 30 people, by adding 20 more paid tickets.On a lighter side, we learnt that we cannot do small things with Hadoop! ;)

So, if you are interested in Hadoop event and want to know more about it, then do come and join us in the workshop. You can register here.

ANTLR as an external tool in eclipse on ubuntu

This tutorial tells how to setup the ANTLR in your eclipse.
STEP 1:
Download the jar file antlrworks-1.4.2.jar from http://www.antlr.org/download.
Further details about ANTLRWorks: The ANTLR GUI Development Environment, follow the link : http://www.antlr.org/works/index.html
STEP 2:
Create a java project in eclipse as follows:
File->New->Project
Select Java and Java project.
Click on Next.
Name the project as "TestANTLR"
Press Finish.
Add the antlrworks-1.4.2.jar to the project classpath.
Right click on "TestANTLR" project .
Select Properties->Libraries.
Click on "Add External jar"
Select the complete path of the "antlrworks-1.4.2.jar" and press Ok.
STEP 3: make it as an external tool
Goto Run->External Tools->Configure
Click on New.
Name: ANTLR Compiler
Tool Location: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26/bin/java
// this must be the complete path to your java
Tool Arguments: -classpath complete_path_to_antlrworks-1.4.2.jar org.antlr.Tool ${resource_name}
Working Directory: ${container_loc}
Here, org.antlr.Tool is the main class which would take the ${resource_name} for processing.
${resource_name} and ${container_loc} can be selected with "Browse Variables" option too.
Going ahead :
*Creating a grammar file
Create a grammar file with .g extension. Say, Example.g
//sample code
grammar Example;
start : 'hello' ID ';' {System.out.println("hiii... "+$ID.text);} ;
ID: 'a'..'z' + ;
WS: (' ' |'\n' |'\r' )+
{$channel=HIDDEN;}
*Running the above code:
Run->External Tools->ANTLR Compiler
Press F5 or right click on the project and "refresh"
all you can see is a lexer and parser files generated with the tokens.
In our example,
ExampleLexer.java , ExampleParser.java and Example.tokens
Create Main.java program in the same project with the following code:
import org.antlr.runtime.*;
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
// create a CharStream that reads from standard input
ANTLRInputStream input = new ANTLRInputStream(System.in);
// create a lexer that feeds off of input CharStream
ExampleLexer lexer = new ExampleLexer(input);
// create a buffer of tokens pulled from the lexer
CommonTokenStream tokens = new CommonTokenStream(lexer);
// create a parser that feeds off the tokens buffer
ExampleParser parser = new ExampleParser(tokens);
// begin parsing at rule start
parser.start();
}
}
Set the arguments in the Run configurations and click on Apply and Run.
Now you have the output at console.
:)