Cascading is a Java library that makes it easy to develop complex workflows on Hadoop. It allows processing of large amounts of data in a scalable and fault-tolerant way. Cascading represents all data as tuples and defines flows as sequences of tuple stream manipulations that compile to MapReduce jobs. For example, a flow could take tuples with words and values, split the words, group by word to sum the values for each word. This provides a more flexible way to develop MapReduce applications compared to Pig.