Hardwood Reaches Beta: S3, Predicate Push-Down, CLI, and More

Hardwood 1.0.0.Beta1 has been released — a new Java-based Apache Parquet parser focused on minimal dependencies and high performance. Key additions include an S3 backend for reading files directly from object storage (and S3-compatible services) without heavy SDK dependencies, predicate push-down support to skip row groups and pages based on statistics, Avro bindings for reading Parquet into GenericRecord instances, and a native CLI for inspecting and converting Parquet files. The S3 integration uses Java's built-in HTTP client with a custom SigV4 implementation. The project is available on Maven Central, with a 1.0 final release expected within weeks and write support planned for 1.1.