Building a Recommendation Engine with Spring and Mahout

The Amazon’s and Google’s of the world have had Ph.D.‘s locked up in back rooms for years creating algorithms to get you to click on things and subsequently buy stuff. One of the big things that those smart people have been working on are recommendation engines. Today, a recommendation engine isn’t something that only the Amazon’s of the world can have. With an hour, and a handful of open source tools, we’ll build a recommendation engine based on the data from the website we probably spend the most time on…StackOverflow. We’ll use Spring XD and Spring Batch to orchestrate the full lifecycle of Hadoop processing (ingest, process, export) and use Apache Mahout to provide us with the recommendation processing. A basic understanding of Hadoop concepts (what Map/Reduce is) and Spring (basic D/I configuration) is expected for this talk.