[Hadoop-common-user] Using my own classes as keys and values

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Schlosser
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 7:57 AM
To: hadoop-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Using my own classes as keys and values

Hello all

Is there a best practice for using my own classes as keys and values?

My first attempt at doing this was successful - I built a
BigIntegerWritable class using IntWritable as a template. It was easy
because BigInteger has methods converting to and from byte arrays,
which I could then write into the DataOutput or read from the
DataInput.

It seems like I should be able to use object serialization to write
to/read from the DataOutput/Input objects and make my own classes
implement the Writable interface. It seems like I should be able to
do something like this:

import java.io.*;

import org.apache.hadoop.io.*;

public class Sample implements Writable {

Address address;
SampleValue value; // sampled value at this point

public Sample(Address a, SampleValue v) {
address = a;
value = v;
}

public SampleValue getValue() { return value;}
public Address getAddress() { return address; }

public String toString () {
return (address.toString() + " " + value.toString());
}

[...]

public void readFields(DataInput in) throws IOException {
ObjectInputStream oin = new
ObjectInputStream((DataInputBuffer)in);

try {
address = (Address)oin.readObject();
value = (SampleValue)oin.readObject();
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
throw new IOException(e.toString());
}

}

public void write(DataOutput out) throws IOException {
ObjectOutputStream oout = new
ObjectOutputStream((DataOutputBuffer)out);

oout.writeObject(address);
oout.writeObject(value);
}
}

This code compiles, but throws exceptions at runtime, complaining that
WritableComparator can not access a member of class Sample with
modifiers "". Can someone tell me what this exception is talking
about?

Do I need to implement a WritableComparator for each class that I want
to implement Writable?

Thanks again for the help.

-steve