Anoa is a Java 8 library built around Avro, Thrift and Jackson for de/serializing records in a consistent manner.

At AdGear, we deal with event logs a lot. Events are all over the place, in Kafka topics, in files, S3 buckets, etc. and they're processed in Hadoop map-reduce jobs, Storm topologies, command-line tools, scripts of all kinds. And naturally event definitions evolve with time, so change must be handled gracefully.

We like to use tried-and-proven cross-platform serialization libraries because we hate reinventing the wheel. Avro is good for batches of records, Thrift is good over the wire and shares a very similar data model with Avro, JSON is simply ubiquitous and Jackson is its de-facto default parser in javaland.

Anoa glues these tools together and expose them with a consistent API. Anoa also comes with a Maven plugin for Avro and Thrift code generation. Finally, Anoa has exception-handling facilities for dealing with broken data.

The Anoa project is divided into 4 modules to try to keep dependencies to a minimum:

• plugin is the schema compiler Maven plugin, essentially just a hack of the Avro Maven plugin.
• test defines the entities used in tests of the next two modules.
• core contains the core components of Anoa with a minimal set of dependencies.
• tools is an extension of the above with various tools and extended Jackson support.

This maven plugin consumes *.avdl schema definition files and generates *.avsc Avro schema files, *.thrift Thrift schema files, as well as the corresponding code: SpecificRecord objects for Avro, TBase objects for thrift.

The definition language is the Avro IDL with a few modifications notably for Thrift interop.

Restrictions:

• No protocols.
• Only simple unions with null are allowed, i.e. union {null, <SUBTYPE>}.

Enhancements:

• Java-style imports with require block in top-level comment string.
• Thrift field index declaration with /** [<THRIFTIDX>] <DOCSTRING> */ in field comment.
• Thrift integer subtypes with @thrift(<SUBTYPE>) field annotations.

The test module contains the schema definitions for the records used by tests in core and tools. Assuch, consider it a reference for plugin usage. Comprehensive examples of Anoa-flavored IDL syntax are available here.

The Anoa core API can be divided into three general categories:

• reading serialized objects: public methods and classes in package com.adgear.anoa.read,
• writing serialized objects: public methods and classes in package com.adgear.anoa.write,
• exception handling: public methods and classes in package com.adgear.anoa.

See the anoa-core javadoc for more details.

We made sure to include only minimal dependencies in core, for this reason this module contains all the stuff that didn't fit in there, and more:

• JDBC support,
• extended Jackson support: CSV, CBOR, Smile, etc.
• a few utility functions for operations on records, in com.adgear.anoa.tools.function,
• a few command-line tools, in com.adgear.anoa.tools.runnable.

See the anoa-tools javadoc for more details.

Anoa is currently built with:

Apache Avro 1.7.7
Apache Thrift 0.9.2
FasterXML Jackson 2.5.1

Released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE file for details. Copyright (C) 2013-2016, Marius Posta.