This sounds great. parquet-java is extremely unpleasant to use with its massive fan-out of dependencies, an awkward API which exposes these dependencies causing the dependencies to bleed into a user's code base - the Hadoop stuff is particularly annoying given the relatively poor quality (IMO) of the Hadoop code base and the amount of class name sharing with built in Java types (like File, FileSystem, etc.). And the performance of parquet-java is very poor compared to the libraries available to other languages.
Thanks! The heavy dependency footprint of parquet-java was the main driver for kicking off this project. Hardwood doesn't have any mandatory dependencies; any libs for compression algorithms used can be added by the user (most of them are single JARs with no further transitive dependencies) as needed. Same for log bindings (Hardwood is using the System.Logger abstraction).