Heron vs Storm

So we had previously linked to the announcement from Twitter about the beta release of Heron Streaming.  We had been building a Storm interface for ViznTrac, but after reviewing some of the differences between Storm and Heron, we might just switch over.  Heron is still in beta, but so is ViznTrac.


Key Changes:

• High level concepts of Topologies with Spouts and Bolts are retained from Storm.  This means that conversion of existing Storm topologies should be easy.
• The Java API is currently the one available for interacting with Heron and creating new topologies.  The Java API is the most widely used for Storm.
• The big change is under the hood.  Clojure, which was the architectural basis for Storm, has been removed.  Many of the underpinnings of Heron are now in C++, which means a build from source for the different environments.

We're still researching.  If we have time over the next couple of weeks, we'll convert ViznTrac's topology to Heron and see how painful it is.