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

This article announces the beta release of Hardwood 1.0.0, a minimal-dependency Apache Parquet parser. Key features include an S3 backend for parsing files directly from object storage (Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Google Cloud Storage), predicate push-down for local and remote files to reduce network I/O, Avro bindings, a CLI tool for inspecting Parquet files, and a new project website with documentation. The S3 backend uses Java's built-in HTTP client and custom AWS SigV4 signing to avoid heavy SDK dependencies. Authentication supports simple key/secret, dynamic credentials, or full AWS credential chain via an optional module.