The easiest way to use the Kite API in your own Java project is to use Apache Maven. Maven is a build tool that handles the end-to-end build life cycle of a project including compilation, testing, packaging, and deployment. In addition, Maven handles many of the details of dependency management for you.

The core of a Maven project is the Project Object Model (POM) file. POM files are written in XML and provide a declarative way to configure your project and declare your dependencies. For more information on working with POM files see Maven’s POM Reference.

To make it even easier to use Kite with Maven, we publish a set of POM files that can be used as the parent of your application’s POM. These application parent POMs are pre-configured with the dependencies you need to get started. The application parent POMs also pre-configure the Kite and Apache Avro Maven plugins for use in your project.

In order to use the application parent POM, you simply need to configure the parent element in your pom.xml file with the appropriate groupId, artifactId, and version:

<parent>
  <groupId>org.kitesdk</groupId>
  <artifactId>kite-app-parent-cdh5</artifactId>
  <version>0.17.1</version>
</parent>

Currently, Kite has an application parent POM for CDH4 and CDH5. You can select the one you want to use by setting the artifactId to kite-app-parent-cdh4 for CDH4 or kite-app-parent-cdh5 for CDH5.

The Kite examples are built using the application parent POMs and are a great way to see what a Kite Maven project looks like. If you’re looking for a very simple starting point, take a look at the dataset example’s pom.xml.

After you’ve created your POM file and written some Java code, you can use Maven to build and test your project. Here is a short reference to some common Maven commands.

To compile your project you would run:

mvn compile

To build a JAR file you would use:

mvn package

To run your unit tests you can run:

mvn test

To install your packaged JAR into your local Maven repository you would use:

mvn install

That last command is especially useful for multi-module Maven project such as the Kite end-to-end demo example. If you want to learn more about working with Maven, check out their Maven in 5 Minutes guide and their follow-up Maven Getting Started Guide.