Major Description
Context: The mailbox subproject (http://james.apache.org/mailbox/) supports maildir, SQL database (via JPA) and Java Content Repository (JCR) as technology for mail storage. This flexibility is achieved thanks to a API design that abstracts mail storage from the mail protocols.
Task: We need to implement mailbox storage as a distributed system on top of Hadoop HDFS. The James mailbox API will be used. A first step is to design how to interact with Hadoop (native api, gora incubator at apache,...) and deal with specific performance questions related to mail loading/parsing in a distributed system (use map/reduce or not, use existing local lucene indexes for search,...). The second step is to implement the HDFS mailbox (maildir mailbox is similar because is stores mails as a file and can be an inspiration). A single James server will still be deployed because we don't have any distributed UID generation.
Mentor: eric at apache dot org
Complexity: medium