== Welcome to the Pandra toolkit (0.2.1) ==

Copyright (C) 2010 Michael Pearson pandra-support@phpgrease.net

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

• What is it?

  Pandra (PHP-Cassandra) is a light-weight PHP based create/read/update/delete (CRUD) layer for the Cassandra distributed datastore.
  Sitting ontop of the generated Thrift Interface files, it suits as a factory patterned rapid prototyping tool.
  
  "Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store.
   Cassandra brings together the distributed systems technologies from Dynamo and the data model from Google's BigTable.
   Like Dynamo, Cassandra is eventually consistent. Like BigTable, Cassandra provides a ColumnFamily-based data model richer than typical key/value systems.
  
   Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008, where it was designed by one of the authors of Amazon's Dynamo.
   In a lot of ways you can think of Cassandra as Dynamo 2.0. Cassandra is in production use at Facebook but is still under heavy development."
   - http://incubator.apache.org/cassandra/
  
  Pandra can be installed and interfaced in a few minutes, building your API or web service on a highly redundant datastore can be realised with relative ease.

• Key Features

  * Clear demarcation of columfamily objects from the underlying cluster connection handlers
  
  * Supports any number of Cassandra nodes, tweakable consistency levels
  
  * Extensible type definition, validation and callback layers
  
  * Supports UUID types
  
  * Flexible arrangement of Keyspaces, Column Families and Super Columns (implements ArrayAccess)
  
  * Schema aware and factory objects
  
  * Extensible Logging interface

• Dependencies

  * Cassandra >= 0.6
  
  * Thrift Interface (tested cassandra.thrift and pre-generated files are packaged)
  
  * PHP >= 5.3
  
  - Optional
  
      * Model Generation - syck yaml
  
      * Caching - APC or Memcached (PECL)
  
      * Logging - Syslog, Sendmail and FirePHP

• Download

  Latest snapshot :  git clone git://github.com/mjpearson/Pandra.git .
  - or -
  Latest stable tag : http://github.com/mjpearson/Pandra/tarball/0.2.1

• Community

  The Pandra homepage is http://www.phpgrease.net/projects/Pandra
  
  For feedback, bugs and general support discussion see http://groups.google.com/group/pandra-user
  
  Developers : http://groups.google.com/group/pandra-dev
  
  Github users may also log bugs directly via http://github.com/mjpearson/pandra/issues