version: 0.1

== Welcome to the Pandra Toolkit ==

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 General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

The Pandra homepage is http://www.phpgrease.net/projects/Pandra

- 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

	* Flexible arrangement of Keyspaces, Column Families and Super Columns (implements ArrayAccess)

	* Schema aware, or build factory objects on the fly

- Dependencies

	* Cassandra >= 0.5.0

	* Thrift Interface (cassandra.thrift and pre-generated files are packaged)

	* PHP >= 5.3