An experimental client and transport for Apache Cassandra based on the vert.x framework. This README is still in progress.

Intravert is built on top of Cassandra. It is not a fork. Rather, it is a plugin which augments (or replaces - up to you) the default CQL and Thrift transports.

Intravert is more then an RPC library, query language, or transport for Cassandra. IntraVert gives access to new powerful ways of working with Cassandra.

• Multiple variations on server side processing allowing users to perform arbitary programatic transformations on the server side before the results are return to the client.

• GETREF feature can be used to execute procedure and join like logic in a single RPC request.

• A simple sync/async API and Transport that runs over HTTP allows clients to chose from JSON, JSON compressed by smile, and even big fat sexy XML.

• No more dealing with byte[] or ByteBuffers. Intravert lets users work with simple familiar objects like String or Integer. See Types and Composites.

From an application standpoint, if you can't do sparse, wide rows, you break compatibility with 90% of Cassandra applications. So that rules out almost everything; if you can't provide the same data model, you're creating fragmentation, not pluggability.

Intravert was conceived of and designed by long time users of Cassandra who have written numerous real-world applications built on the existing Thrift API.

This API had it's warts for sure, but it was felt among us that the direction of the Cassandra project with regards to the introduction of CQL sidestepped some of the core reasons we chose Cassandra in the first place.

Therefore, Intravert is a new approach designed to leverage what we've learned down in the trenches writing and deploying applications which use Cassandra. Intravert is not intended as a fork, thumb in the eye, or any other detrimental action to the Cassandra community or commercial vendors around such. It is simply a purpose built tool to facilitate GettingShitDone™ with real world applications.

Spend some time looking through the documentation, test cases, and examples to see if this approach makes sense for your architecture.

You can find a brief overview located here: https://github.com/zznate/intravert-ug/wiki

If you are super impatient, download the source, use maven to install:

mvn install

Then use maven executor to start the IntravertDeamon thusly:

mvn -e exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="org.usergrid.vx.server.IntravertDeamon"

To ensure that everything is working, invoke the say_hello.sh script in the examples director:

./examples/say_hello.sh

You can then try some of the additional examples for either the rest or json sub directories.