MapReduce for Ruby on Rails?!

This quarter I’m doing some interesting work in a pilot course founded by a special projects guy at Google, Christophe Bisciglia. We’re learning the basics of MapReduce. With access to 40 brand new high end servers running in a Hadoop cluster, I’m sure we’ll come up with something good.

This post needs pictures. I’ll get some. For now, you’ll have to make do with lame placeholders.

server room pic

christophe pic

hanah/albert pic

So, what about Ruby? The last Ruby on Rails project I completed was Railpad, a WYSIWYG rich text wiki. I shut down our test server only a few days ago after it had been up for 288 days. In those 288 days, not one line of Ruby flowed from my fingertips. Ruby on Rails left a good aftertaste, and I wanted to use it again for my team’s MapReduce project.

Here’s where Starfish comes in. It’s a Hadoop plugin for Ruby on Rails. I hope it works.

UPDATE: I ended up writing some Python to get the job done instead of relying on the Rails framework.