The pipelining abstraction works really well with the Hadoop ecosystem and other state-of-the-art messaging technologies. Cascading provides the blueprints to pipeline for MapReduce. As a framework, it offers a frame to build applications. It comes with several decisions that are already made, and it provides a foundation, including support structures that allow us to get started and deliver results quickly.

Unlike Hive and Pig, where user-defined functionality is separated from the query language, Cascading integrates everything into a single language. Functional and scalable languages follow lightweight, modular, high performance, and testable principles. Scalding combines functional programming with Cascading and brings the best of both worlds by providing an unmatchable way of developing distributed applications.

In the next chapter, we will introduce Scala, set up our environment, and demonstrate the power and expressiveness of Scalding when building MapReduce applications.