My article on how to build flexible apps on top of the BigInsights platform has been published. This demonstrates a cool way to combine some client-end JavaScript and existing technologies to build a Big Data query interface without developing a specialised application for the purpose.

It’s no secret that a significant proportion of the needs for big data have come from the explosion in Internet technologies. Up until 10-20 years ago, the idea of a public-facing application having more than a few million users was unheard of. Today, even a modest website can have millions of users, and if it’s active, can generate millions of data items every day. The irony is that the very infrastructure and systems that create big data can also work in reverse, and provide some of the better ways to integrate and work with that data. Usefully, InfoSphere® BigInsights™ comes with support for managing and executing data jobs through a simple REST API. And through the Jaql interface, we can run queries and get information directly from a Hadoop cluster. This article looks at how these systems work together to give you a rich basis for capturing data and provide an interface to get the information back out again.

Building flexible apps from big data sources.