How and when to use Storm

I am a believer of the fact that the quickest way to get acquainted to a tool or technology is to do it, and we have been doing a lot of theoretical talking so far rather than actually doing it, so let's actually begin the fun. We would start with the basic word count topology, I have lot of experience of using Storm on Linux, and there is a lot of online material available for the same. I have used a Windows VM for execution of the word count topology. Here are a couple of prerequisites:

• apache-storm-0.9.5-src.
• JDK 1.6+.
• Python 2.x. (I figured this out by a little trial and error. My Ubuntu always had Python and it never gave any trouble; for example, the word count uses a Python script for splitting sentences, so I set up Python 3 (the latest version), but later figured out that the compatible one is 2.x.)
• Maven.
• Eclipse.

Here we go.

Set up the following environment variables accurately:

• JAVA_HOME
• MVN_HOME
• PATH

The PATH variable should have the path to Python installation...