ZooKeeper

Chapter 8. Curator: A High-Level API for ZooKeeper

At a high level, Curator is a set of libraries that build on top of ZooKeeper. One of the core goals of Curator is to manage the ZooKeeper handle for you, removing some (ideally all) of the complexity that connection management entails. Connection management is often tricky, as we have discussed in previous chapters, and Curator might come in handy at times.

As part of managing the handle, Curator implements a set of recipes that developers commonly use, incorporating best practices and known edge-case handling. For example, Curator implements recipes for primitives such as locks, barriers, and caches. For ZooKeeper operations like create, delete, getData, etc., it streamlines programming by allowing us to chain calls, a programming style often called fluent. It also provides namespaces, automatic reconnection, and other facilities that make applications more robust.

The Curator components were originally implemented and contributed by Netflix, and it has recently been promoted to a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation.

In this chapter, we cover the implementation of the master in our example using Curator features. Our goal is not to provide a detailed and extensive discussion of Curator, but simply to introduce it and highlight some of the features that are convenient to use with a ZooKeeper application. Check the project page for an extensive list of its features.

The Curator Client

Just as with ZooKeeper, before ...