Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, (Revised) Third Edition, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Application Development with Drivers

Now that we’ve looked at how to design a microservice architecture for a hotel application, let’s look at how you might implement one of the services within that application—the Reservation Service. To write an application using Cassandra, you’re going to need a driver, and thankfully you are in good hands.

You’re likely used to connecting to relational databases using drivers. For example, in Java, JDBC is an API that abstracts the vendor implementation of the relational database to present a consistent way of storing and retrieving data using Statements, PreparedStatements, ResultSets, and so forth. To interact with the database, you get a driver that works with the particular database you’re using, such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL; the implementation details of this interaction are hidden from the developer.

There are a number of client drivers available for Cassandra as well, including support for most popular languages. There are benefits to these clients, in that you can easily embed them in your own applications, and that they frequently offer more features than the CQL native interface does, including connection pooling and JMX integration and monitoring. In the following sections, you’ll learn about the various clients available and the features they offer.

Hector, Astyanax, and Other Legacy Clients

In the early days of Cassandra, the community produced a number of client drivers for different languages. ...