How to interactive submit spark task in Web application's User interface? - scala

Question

BackGround:
Our project is build on PlayFrameWork.
Front-end language: JavaScript
Back-end language: Scala
we are develope a web application,the server is a cluster.
Want to achieve:
In the web UI, User first input some parameters which about query, and click the button such as "submit".Then these parameters will be sent to backend. (This is easy，obviously)
When backend get parameters, backend start reading and process the data which store in HDFS. Data processing include data-cleaning,filtering and other operations such as clustering algorithms,not just a spark-sql query. All These operations need to run on spark cluster
We needn't manually pack a fat jar and submit it to cluster and send the result to front-end（These are what bothering me!）
What we have done:
We build a spark-project separately in IDEA. When we get parameters, we manually assign these parameters to variables in spark-project.
Then "Build Artifacts"->"Bulid" to get a fat jar.
Then submit by two approaches:
"spark-submit --class main.scala.Test --master yarn /path.jar"
run scala code directly in IDEA on local mode (if change to Yarn, will throw Exceptions).
When program execution finished, we get the processed_data and store it.
Then read the processed_data's path and pass it to front-end.
All are not user interactively submit. Very stupid!
So if I am a user, I want to query or process data on cluster and get feedback on front-end conveniently.
What should i do?
Which tools or lib could use?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is multiple ways to submit a spark job:
using spark-submit command on terminal.
using spark built-in rest API. you can click to find out how to use it.
providing a rest API in yourself in your program and set the api as the Main-Class to run the jar on your spark cluster master. By doing so, your api should dispatch the input job submit requests to the certain action you want. At your api you should instantiate the class where your SparkContext is instantiated. This action is the equivalent of the spark-submit action. It means that when rest api receives the job submission request and do as mentioned above you can see the job progression on the master web ui and then your job termination your api is up and waits for your next request.
**The 3rd solution is my own experience to run different types of algorithms in a web crawler. **

Answer 2

So generally you have two approaches:
Create Spark application that will also be a web service
Create Spark application that will be called by a web service
First approach - spark app is a web service, is not good approach, because for as long as your web service will be running you will also use resources on a cluster (except if you run spark on mesos with specific configuration) - read more about cluster managers here.
Second approach - service and spark app separated is better. In this approach you can create one or multiple spark applications that will be launched by calling spark submit from web service. There are also two options - create single spark app that will be called with parameters that will specify what to do, or create one spark app for one query. The result of the queries in this approach could be just saved to a file or sent to a web server via network or any using any other inter process communication approach.