[jhammerb]

from my perspective, a single user interface paradigm is unlikely to cover the variety of use cases that the full suite of hadoop platform services (flume, sqoop, hdfs, mapreduce, hive, pig, oozie, hbase) provides.

at cloudera, we've built and released into open source a user interface construction kit and an environment to house these various "applications". that way we can incorporate any metaphor you'd like: file browser, spreadsheet, yahoo pipes, etc.

see http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/whats-new-in-cdh3b2-hue and http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/developing-applications... for details.