Dynamic ECL

One of the powerful features of the HPCC Systems platform, is its ability to dynamically execute ECL code. Think of it as the ability to run a script (like SQL, Java Script, Groovy etc) on the fly in a production system. The platform provides you with this capability via the ECL Direct services interface.

The ECL Direct service can be invoked via SOAP or plain HTTP. For example, we could write code in Java to execute ECL on a remote cluster in the following fashion:


The example uses the Open Source HPCC Systems platform running within a Virtual Machine. Additional credentials would be required to be passed if the security module is enabled.

How is this feature useful? In general this feature allows ECL to be passed to HPCC Clusters from within other programming languages similar to the way programmers currently interface with traditional SQL database servers. The following are a few specific cases where the ECL Direct interface serves a purpose:

• For integrating HPCC with ETL tools like Pentaho, Informatica etc
• For building query interfaces like JDBC and ODBC
• Online dynamic query applications
• Building IDE and Debugging tools for ECL
• and more.... 

As you can see the HPCC Systems platform provides us with a great amount of flexibility with Dynamic ECL. The ability to write and submit ECL to a live environment without the need to compile and package code makes it easy for developers to build powerful integration's.