Anand Nalya

S4 is a distributed stream processing platform from Yahoo. It is often seen as the real-time counterpart of Hadoop. S4 being fault tolerant and horizontally scalable helps you in building very large stream processing application that can do anything from detecting earthquakes to finding that perfect bit of advertising that the visitor on your website is most likely to click.

At its core, an S4 application consists of a number of Processing Elements (PEs) that are wired together with the help of a spring configuration file that defines the PEs and the flow of events in the system. Also, events are produced by event producers that listen that sends these events to the client adapter for S4, from where, the S4 platform takes over and dispatch it to appropriate processing elements. After processing these events, PEs can choose to dispatch them to other PEs for further processing or they can choose to produce output events. Thus, arbitrarily complex behavior can be derived together by wiring a simple set of PEs.

S4 comes with a few example applications, but here is a much simpler S4WordCount application that shows how to:

1. Keep state in a PE.
2. Dispatch events from a PE.
3. Process multiple events from a single PE.
4. Write a simple java client for sending events to S4.

In S4WordCount, we will build a simple WordReceiverPE, that will receive events in the form of word and will simply print these words on stdout. It will also identify sentences in the word stream and then forward these sentences for further processing to SenteceReceiverPE. WordReceiverPE will also produce receive sentence events and print them to stdout.

First lets have a look at Word and Sentence, the event object used in our example:

package test.s4;

public class Word {
	private String string;

	public String getString() {
		return string;
	}

	public void setString(String message) {
		this.string = message;
	}

	@Override
	public String toString() {
		return "Word [string=" + string + "]";
	}
}

S4 uses keys, which is a set of some properties of the event object, for routing/dispatching events. In this case since Word is the key-less entry point into the system, and we don’t have any key for it, but for Sentence which will be processed further, we have a Sentence.sentenceId as the key. (For simplicity, all Sentence have the same sentenceId, 1)

Now let’s have a look at our first PE, i.e. WordReceiverPE:

We define a StringBuilder that will be used to accumulate words to form a Sentence. The processEvent(Word) method simply prints the received word on stdout and appends the word to the builder. It then checks if the sentence is complete by checking for . at the end of the builder and if so, it creates a Sentence event(object) and dispatches it to the Sentence stream. Once dispatched the processEvent(Sentence) will receive that event and will again print the sentence to stdout.

Now let’s have a look at SenteceReceiverPE, our second PE which does nothing but print the received Sentence on stdout.

Finally, lets see the content of the application config file that wires all this together and forms a valid S4 application. The name of the config file should follow the naming convention of <AppName>-config.xml. In this case we will call the config file S4WordCount-conf.xml

This is a spring bean definition file. The first bean, wordCatcher is an object of class test.s4.WordReceiverPE and it injects a dispatcher called dispatcher into WordRecieverPE. We will look at properties of dispatcher later. keys define the stream on which our PE will be listening for event. RawWords * means that it will be receiving all events on the stream named RawWords irrespective of their keys. Similar is the intention for Sentence *.

Our second bean is sentenceCatcher which is an object of class test.s4.SentenceReceiverPE and will accept all events on stream called Sentence.

Third is the definition for the dispatcher which we injected into wordCatcher. The dispatcher needs a partitioner that partitions the events based on some key and then dispatches them to appropriate PEs. In this case we are using the DefaultPartitioner whose properties are defined later by sentenceIdPartitoner bean which says that partition the event objects on Sentence stream by sentenceId property. dispatcher uses the S4 provided commLayerEmitter to emit the events.

Running the application

To run this application on the S4:

1. Setup S4 as documented here.
2. Create a S4WordCount.jar from above classes.
3. Deploy the application on S4, by creating the following directory structure:

   	/$S4_IMAGE
   		/s4-apps
   			/S4WordCount
   				S4WordCount-conf.xml
   				/lib
   					S4Wordcount.jar

4. Start S4: $S4_IMAGE/scripts/start-s4.sh -r client-adapter &
5. Start client adapter: $S4_IMAGE/scripts/run-client-adapter.sh -s client-adapter -g s4 -d $S4_IMAGE/s4-core/conf/default/client-stub-conf.xml &

Now S4 is ready to receive events. Following is an event sender that uses the java client library to send events to S4. It reads one word at a time from stdin and sends it to S4.

Run client: java TestMessageSender localhost 2334 RawWords test.s4.Word

Here is the sample output on the S4 console:

Received: Word [string=this]
Received: Word [string=is]
Received: Word [string=a]
Received: Word [string=sentence.]

Using fast path!
Value 1, partition id 0
wrapper is stream:Sentence keys:[{sentenceId = 1}:0] keyNames:null event:Sentence [string= this is a sentence.] => 0
Received Sentence(WordReceiverPE) : Sentence [string= this is a sentence.]
Received Sentence: Sentence [string= this is a sentence.]