The status quo is not working. There are way too many questions on the user list and on irc about problems with writing Thrift code, even when well-maintained clients exist for their language of choice. And that's just the users who were motivated enough to ask instead of tweeting that thrift sucks and giving up.
I think driving people to a real client is primarily a problem we can solve with cleanup of the wiki and web site. A harder problem is that Choice Is Bad from a user perspective. We shouldn't be making people evaluate Hector vs Pelops, FluentCassandra vs Aquiles, phpcassa vs SimpleCassie before writing their application. At the time they need to make this decision they have the very least amount of experience with Cassandra on which to base their evaluation; we should be guiding them to a sensible default. We are failing our users if we make them click through to the version control history to see whether phpcassa is more actively maintained than simplecassie. It's a vicious cycle, too: since there are no "official" clients, people are quicker to write their own instead of contributing to an existing one, leading to more proliferation of (often) half-baked clients taking up space on the wiki page. We're just getting started on this process for 0.7, but take a look at how 0.6 ended up: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ClientOptions06. Over half of those are abandoned now, but a new user would have to do a lot of spelunking to figure out which was which. Moving clients in-tree would solve this, and the problem is bad enough that I almost wrote an email proposing that, but I would really prefer to avoid subjecting clients to our PMC, voting process, ticket tracking system, etc. Instead, I think we we should aggressively curate the ClientOptions page: pick an official client for each language, and move the rest to an AlternativeClients page. This wouldn't be written in stone; if someone wrote a Twisted client that he thinks is better than Telephus, we can have a discussion on whether to move to the new one. But we need to have a default choice to take the pain out of getting started with Cassandra. -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder of Riptano, the source for professional Cassandra support http://riptano.com
