[HBASE-2051] Use builder pattern to improve usability of client API

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Andrew Kyle Purtell
• Created: 16/Dec/09 00:08
• Updated: 11/Jun/22 23:16
• Resolved: 12/May/14 00:38

Description

From Paul Smith up on hbase-user@:

I think a good collection of useful builders and utilities that handle the 80% case will help HBase gain much more traction. As an person starting with HBase, there are a lot of concepts to get, Bytes definitely get in the way of seeing the real underlying patterns. I'm a total believer in understanding the internals to get the best out of a product, but that often comes after experimentation, and these high-level libraries grease the wheels for faster 'grok'ing the concepts.

Thinking out loud here, but something like this may be useful:

PutBuilder builder = new PutBuilder(hTable);
// first Row
builder.withRowKey(1stRowKey).withColumnFamily("foo")
    .put("columnA", valueA)
    .put("columnB",valueB);
// secondRow
builder.withRowKey(2ndRowKey).withColumnFamily("eek")
    .put("columnC", valueC)
    .put("columnD",valueD);
..
builder.putAll();

Perhaps we could use the Builder pattern to achieve simplification (e.g. HBASE-1990) and API support for multicalls (HBASE-1986, HBASE-1845) at the same time. Method variants should accept byte[] or String for keys or values, and lists.

Issue Links

• relates to: HBASE-1845 MultiGet, MultiDelete, and MultiPut - batched to the appropriate region servers
• relates to: HBASE-1986 Batch Gets
• relates to: HBASE-1839 Reconciling batch puts, deletes and gets
• relates to: HBASE-2597 Use "Builder" pattern instead of many-argument constructors
• relates to: HBASE-2609 Harmonize the Get and Delete operations
• relates to: HBASE-1990 Add methods accepting strings for family/qualifier in client