[Hadoop Wiki] Update of "HDFS-APIs" by dhrubaBorthakur

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The following page has been changed by dhrubaBorthakur:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HDFS-APIs

New page:
= Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) APIs in perl, python, ruby and php =

The Hadoop Distributed File System is written in Java. An application
that wants to store/fetch data to/from HDFS can use the Java API
This means that applications that are not written in Java cannot
access HDFS in an elegant manner.

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services
development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation
engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly
between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

This project exposes HDFS APIs using the Thrift software stack. This
allows applciations written in a myriad of languages to access
HDFS elegantly.


== The Application Programming Interface (API) ==

The HDFS API that is exposed through Thrift can be found in src/contrib/thriftfs/if/hadoopfs.thrift. The perl, python, ruby and php APIs can be found at src/contrib/thriftfs/gen-* directories.

== Compilation ==

The compilation process creates a server org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.HadooopThriftServer
that implements the Thrift interface defined in if/hadoopfs.thrift.

Th thrift compiler is used to generate API stubs in python, php, ruby,
cocoa, etc. The generated code is checked into the directories gen-*.
The generated java API is checked into lib/hadoopthriftapi.jar.

There is a sample python script hdfs.py in the scripts directory. This python
script, when invoked, creates a HadoopThriftServer in the background, and then
communicates with HDFS using the API. This script is for demonstration purposes
only.