Trying out (pending) James 3.0-beta4 HBase mail store - take 1

Today I decided to try the newest (pending) release of James : 3.0-beta4.
I have access to a VM cluster of machines running HBase and I wanted to see how things work, maybe do a small stress test.

Downloaded the binary release from the staging repo, unpacked and began configuring the James to enable the hbase mailstore implementation.

Changed a line in mailbox.conf to enable hbase mailstore provider, changed

import resource="classpath:META-INF/org/apache/james/spring-mailbox.xml"

from spring-server.xml to

import resource="classpath:META-INF/org/apache/james/spring-mailbox-hbase.xml"

and uncommented the mailbox declaration from spring-mailbox-hbase.xml to make the Hbase mail store implementation available to the spring context. After this I copied hbase-site.xml (and hdfs-site.xml) inside the James conf directory.

And with that last step James is configured to send emails to the Hbase cluster. All things done, I started James with bin/run and then.... Exception.

| james.mailprocessor | Unable to init mailet LocalDelivery: org.apache.mailet.MailetException: Could not load mailet (LocalDelivery);
nested exception is:
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.apache.james.transport.mailets.LocalDelivery': Injection of resource dependencies failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'hbase-mailboxmanager' defined in class path resource [META-INF/org/apache/james/spring-mailbox-hbase.xml]: Cannot resolve reference to bean 'hbase-sessionMapperFactory' while setting constructor argument; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'hbase-sessionMapperFactory' defined in class path resource [META-INF/org/apache/james/spring-mailbox-hbase.xml]: Instantiation of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.BeanInstantiationException: Could not instantiate bean class [org.apache.james.mailbox.hbase.HBaseMailboxSessionMapperFactory]: Constructor threw exception; nested exception is java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Not a host:port pair: �%32649-- removed hostnames-- net,60000,1329515254741
.....

Searched the cause of exception and found out that it's because of a version mismatch. Unfortunately the cluster is running hbase 0.92 and the client is running 0.90. The client serialization is incompatible with the one used by the server.

Aside for the fact that the exception was fatal there is an upside to this: James is trying to connect to the the cluster.

Just found out that HBase 0.92 is on Maven Central, but without tests so this will make upgrading impossible because of the unit tests which require it.

The tests jar will be available in 0.92.1 (as stated on hbase-dev). If that tekes too long I will build and test it with a private release of Hbase 0.92.

Hope things move a bit faster with 0.92.1 with respect to artifacts being available on Maven Central.