The Bigdata BW Plugin 1.0 uses a RESTful API to get a connection to HDFS through the user and the server URL provided for the connection resource. Since a HTTP REST API supports the complete FileSystem/FileContext interface for HDFS, the plugin program uses the Jersey client (com.sun.jersey.api.client.*) to prepare the RESTful API service request to HDFS server with operation GETHOMEDIRECTORY which will return the current user's home directory in this filesystem.

The HTTP GET request initialized by the Plugin is defined as follows.

http://HDFS_ServerURL/webhdfs/v1/?op=GETHOMEDIRECTORY&user.name=<the user_name provided>

The connection status can be checked through a command like the following,

curl -i "http://<HOST>:<PORT>/webhdfs/v1/?op=GETHOMEDIRECTORY&user.name=<the user_name provided>"