Kite is a set of libraries, tools, examples, and documentation focused on making it easier to build systems on top of the Hadoop ecosystem.

The goals of Kite are:

• Codify expert patterns and practices for building data-oriented systems and applications.
• Let developers focus on business logic, not plumbing or infrastructure.
• Provide smart defaults for platform choices.
• Support piecemeal adoption via loosely-coupled modules.

Eric Sammer recorded a webinar in which he talks about the goals of the project, which was then called CDK (the Cloudera Development Kit).

This project is organized into modules. Modules may be independent or have dependencies on other modules within Kite. When possible, dependencies on external projects are minimized.

The following modules currently exist.

The data module provides logical abstractions on top of storage subsystems (e.g. HDFS) that let users think and operate in terms of records, datasets, and dataset repositories. If you're looking to read or write records directly to/from a storage system, the data module is for you.

The Kite Maven Plugin provides Maven goals for packaging, deploying, and running distributed applications.

The Morphlines module reduces the time and skills necessary to build and change Hadoop ETL stream processing applications that extract, transform and load data into Apache Solr, Enterprise Data Warehouses, HDFS, HBase or Analytic Online Dashboards.

The tools module provides command-line tools and APIs for performing common tasks with the Kite.

Example code demonstrating how to use Kite can be found in the separate GitHub repository at https://github.com/kite-sdk/kite-examples

Kite is provided under the Apache Software License 2.0. See the file LICENSE.txt for more information.

To build using the default CDH dependencies use

mvn install

For Hadoop 2:

mvn install -Dhadoop.profile=2

For Hadoop 1:

mvn install -Dhadoop.profile=1

By default Java 7 is used. If you want to use Java 6, then add -DjavaVersion=1.6, -DjavaTargetVersion=1.6 e.g.

mvn install -DjavaVersion=1.6 -DjavaTargetVersion=1.6