Netflix opens "portal" for its open source projects

Netflix, the US DVD-by-mail and video-streaming company, has announced that it has opened a "portal" for its open source projects. It has also released the first new project into the "portal" – Curator, a Java client library for Apache Zookeeper. The "portal" is a github page for the Netflix projects. Other projects that the company plans to add to the "portal" include Astyanax (an Apache Cassandra client), Priam (Cassandra configuration and token management and backup/recovery co-process) and CassJMeter (Cassandra tests as a JMeter plugin).

Curator is the first project available; it is designed to address problems with using the bundled ZooKeeper Java client which Netflix developers say is "non-trivial and error prone" and involves a lot of manual housekeeping code. Curator includes a client which replaces the bundled ZooKeeper class that handles some low-level housekeeping, a high-level API/framework which handles the complexity of managing connections, and a collection of curator recipes built on top of the framework. Netflix uses ZooKeeper extensively as part of ID generation, backup control, ID tracking and caches. The Curator source is available under the Apache 2.0 licence from the github repository and binaries are hosted on Maven Central. Documentation can be found on the Curator wiki.

(djwm)