Creating Fluo applications

Once you have Fluo installed and running on your cluster, you can now run Fluo applications which consist of clients and observers.

If you are new to Fluo, consider first running the phrasecount application on your Fluo instance. Otherwise, you can create your own Fluo client or observer by the following the steps below.

For both clients and observers, you will need to include the following in your Maven pom:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.fluo</groupId>
  <artifactId>fluo-api</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-beta-2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.fluo</groupId>
  <artifactId>fluo-core</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-beta-2</version>
  <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

Fluo provides a classpath command to help users build a runtime classpath. This command along with the hadoop jar command is useful when writing scripts to run Fluo client code. These command allow the scripts to use the versions of Hadoop, Accumulo, and Zookeeper installed on a cluster.

Creating a Fluo client

To create a FluoClient, you will need to provide it with a FluoConfiguration object that is configured to connect to your Fluo instance.

If you have access to the fluo.properties file that was used to configure your Fluo instance, you can use it to build a FluoConfiguration object with all necessary properties which are all properties with the io.fluo.client.* prefix in fluo.properties:

FluoConfiguration config = new FluoConfiguration(new File("fluo.properties"));

You can also create an empty FluoConfiguration object and set properties using Java:

FluoConfiguration config = new FluoConfiguration();
config.setAccumuloUser("user");
config.setAccumuloPassword("pass");
config.setAccumuloInstance("instance");

Once you have FluoConfiguration object, pass it to the newClient() method of FluoFactory to create a FluoClient:

FluoClient client = FluoFactory.newClient(config)

It may help to reference the API javadocs while you are learning the Fluo API.

Running application code

The fluo exec <app name> <class> {arguments} provides an easy way to execute application code. It will execute a class with a main method if a jar containing the class is placed in the lib directory of the application. When the class is run, Fluo classes and dependencies will be on the classpath. The fluo exec command can inject the applications configuration if the class is written in the following way. Defining the injection point is optional.

import javax.inject.Inject;

public class AppCommand {

  //when run with fluo exec command, the applications configuration will be injected
  @Inject
  private static FluoConfiguration fluoConfig;

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    try(FluoClient fluoClient = FluoFactory.newClient(fluoConfig)) {
      //do stuff with Fluo
    }
  }
}

Creating a Fluo observer

To create an observer, follow these steps:

1. Create a class that extends AbstractObserver.
2. Build a jar containing this class and include this jar in the lib/ directory of your Fluo application.
3. Configure your Fluo instance to use this observer by modifying the Observer section of fluo.properties.
4. Restart your Fluo instance so that your Fluo workers load the new observer.

Application Configuration

Each observer can have its own configuration. This is useful for the case of using the same observer code w/ different parameters. However for the case of sharing the same configuration across observers, fluo provides a simple mechanism to set and access application specific configuration. See the javadoc on FluoClient.getAppConfiguration() for more details.

Debugging Applications

While monitoring Fluo metrics can detect problems (like too many transaction collisions) in a Fluo application, metrics may not provide enough information to debug the root cause of the problem. To help debug Fluo applications, low-level logging of transactions can be turned on by setting the following loggers to TRACE:

Logger	Level	Information
io.fluo.tx	TRACE	Provides detailed information about what transactions read and wrote
io.fluo.tx.summary	TRACE	Provides a one line summary about each transaction executed
io.fluo.tx.collisions	TRACE	Provides details about what data was involved When a transaction collides with another transaction

Below is an example log after setting io.fluo.tx to TRACE. The number following txid: is the transactions start timestamp from the Oracle.

2015-02-11 18:24:05,341 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 begin() thread: 198
2015-02-11 18:24:05,343 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 class: com.SimpleLoader
2015-02-11 18:24:05,357 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 get(4333, stat count ) -> null
2015-02-11 18:24:05,357 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 set(4333, stat count , 1)
2015-02-11 18:24:05,441 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 commit() -> SUCCESSFUL commitTs: 4
2015-02-11 18:24:05,341 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 begin() thread: 198
2015-02-11 18:24:05,442 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 3 close()
2015-02-11 18:24:05,343 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 class: com.SimpleLoader
2015-02-11 18:24:05,357 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 get(4333, stat count ) -> 1
2015-02-11 18:24:05,357 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 set(4333, stat count , 2)
2015-02-11 18:24:05,441 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 commit() -> SUCCESSFUL commitTs: 6
2015-02-11 18:24:05,442 [fluo.tx ] TRACE: txid: 5 close()

The log above traces the following sequence of events.

• Transaction T1 has a start timestamp of 3
• Thread with id 198 is executing T1, its running code from the class com.SimpleLoader
• T1 reads row 4333 and column stat count which does not exist
• T1 sets row 4333 and column stat count to 1
• T1 commits successfully and its commit timestamp from the Oracle is 4.
• Transaction T2 has a start timestamp of 5 (because its 5 > 4 it can see what T1 wrote).
• T2 reads a value of 1 for row 4333 and column stat count
• T2 sets row 4333 and column stat countto2`
• T2 commits successfully with a commit timestamp of 6

Below is an example log after only setting io.fluo.tx.collisions to TRACE. This setting will only log trace information when a collision occurs. Unlike the previous example, what the transaction read and wrote is not logged. This shows that a transaction with a start timestamp of 106 and a class name of com.SimpleLoader collided with another transaction on row r1 and column fam1 qual1.

2015-02-11 18:17:02,639 [tx.collisions] TRACE: txid: 106 class: com.SimpleLoader
2015-02-11 18:17:02,639 [tx.collisions] TRACE: txid: 106 collisions: {r1=[fam1 qual1 ]}

When applications read and write arbitrary binary data, this does not log so well. In order to make the trace logs human readable, non ASCII chars are escaped using hex. The convention used it \xDD where D is a hex digit. Also the \ character is escaped to make the output unambiguous.