For those of you that have started to explore HADOOP you might be familiarly with HUE (Hadoop User Interface) or Linux command line for moving files to and from the HADOOP Distributed File system (HDFS).
As a bit of a novelty I thought it'd be interesting to build a prototype of an HDFS Explorer, using HANA XS & SAPUI5.
HUE File Browser HANA: HADOOP HDFS Explorer
HUE is primarily is built using PYTHON with an number of PYTHON plugins, such as DJANGO and MAKO.
My HANA HDFS Explorer is built using HANA XS, SAPUI5 (Horizontal Splitter, Tree & Table controls), a sprinkling of custom Javascript & the HADOOP WebHDFS REST API (accessible via xshttpdest). It's a very rough prototype, and is not indeed reproduce all the same functionality of HUE file browser.
NOTE: as standard the webHDFS REST service may run off ports 50070 & 50075 on your HADOOP cluster. I needed to redirect these to 50001 & 50014 respectively to enable xshttpdest to work. For Hana cloud platform the valid ports to use are documented here SAP HANA Cloud Platform
Here a few screen shots comparing the original and the new improved HANA version 
Original HUE:
HANA XS Version (with Download option):
Select the file and then click the Download button:
The dataflow of HANA XS version is:
The HADOOP webHDFS Rest service makes uses different url parameters [operations (op)] for interacting with HDFS.
I only used the following operations in this example:
FILESTATUS Which acts like 'dir' or 'ls' commands on a specified HDFS directory
OPEN Which acts like an ftp 'get' command.
NOTE: OPEN is called twice. 1st on the HADOOP Name node to get the DATA node the file is stored, then secondly on the specified DATA node download the file.
The full code is available to download here: https://github.com/AronMacDonald/HanaHdfsExplorer