Curator Framework for Apache ZooKeeper
Objective
My purpose to write this blog post is just to briefly introduce you to Apache Curator framework, esp. in case you have been using Apache ZooKeeper Java API but never tried Curator framework. In such case, I strongly recommend you to try Curator.
Difficulties while using ZooKeeper API
- Handling the client/server connections.
- Writing so many lines of code to get a basic functionality (a.k.a. Recipe).
- Handling ‘recoverable’ errors
Simple analogies to understand the difference between Zookeeper and Curator
As Patric Hunt (Zookeeper committer) said – “Guava is to Java what Curator is to Zookeeper”.
Or we can say – “Groovy is to Java what Curator is to Zookeeper”.
Curator’s main benefits are:
- A simplified API
- Automatic ZooKeeper connection management with retries
- Mature implementations of ZooKeeper recipes
Not only this, it’s so simple to create a new ZooKeeper recipe using Curator framework.
Here’s another interesting blog in praise of Curator –
Apache ZooKeeper Made Simpler with Curator
Thank you Netflix for writing this framework! 🙂