Including the client-dev list for thoughts/ideas. On Dec 3, 2010, at 11:43 AM, Jonathan Ellis wrote:
> 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
