Getting Up and Running with Cassandra - Learning Apache Cassandra - page 23

Interacting with Cassandra

Most common programming languages have drivers for interacting with Cassandra. When
selecting a driver, you should look for libraries that support the CQL binary protocol ,
which is the latest and most efficient way to communicate with Cassandra.

Tip

The CQL binary protocol is a relatively new introduction; older versions of Cassandra used
the Thrift protocol as a transport layer. Although Cassandra continues to support Thrift,
avoid Thrift-based drivers, as they are less performant than the binary protocol.

Here are CQL binary drivers available for some popular programming languages:

Language Driver Available at

Java DataStax Java Driver github.com/datastax/java-driver

Python DataStax Python Driver github.com/datastax/python-driver

Ruby DataStax Ruby Driver github.com/datastax/ruby-driver

C++ DataStax C++ Driver github.com/datastax/cpp-driver

C# DataStax C# Driver github.com/datastax/csharp-driver

JavaScript (Node.js) node-cassandra-cql github.com/jorgebay/node-cassandra-cql

PHP phpbinarycql github.com/rmcfrazier/phpbinarycql

While you will likely use one of these drivers in your applications, to try out the code ex-
amples in this topic, you can simply use the cqlsh tool, which is a command-line interface
for executing CQL queries and viewing the results. To start cqlsh on OS X or Linux,
simply type cqlsh into your command line; you should see something like this:

$ cqlsh
Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:9160.