Virgil: GUI for Cassandra now included in Virgil

Sure, its read-only.

Sure, its focused on Strings.

But it was written in only 100 lines of code using Virgil's REST layer for Cassandra and includes all of ExtJS's goodness. (if you are into that kind of thing)

You can see the entire the GUI is contained in a single javascript class:

http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/virgil/source/browse/trunk/src/main/webapp/main.js

That javascript uses two GridPanel's: one to display column families grouped by keyspaces (on the east region panel), and another to display columns grouped by rowkeys (in the center panel). Each of the GridPanel's uses a store backed by an ExtJS model.

To accomodate the GUI, we added fetch capabilities the REST layer for both schema information and rows using key ranges. I'll detail those capabilities in a follow up post.

For instructions on how to access the GUI and to see what it looks like check out the wiki page.

Even in its existing state, this a useful GUI to quickly inspect the contents of a Cassandra node. It is also a good demonstration of how you might include a javascript component for visualization into your own application with very little effort.

...

Virgil now includes an elementary REST interface. (thanks to Dave Strauss @ Pantheon for his help defining the interface) It also includes simple SOLR integration and a GUI. Next up, map/reduce for the masses via REST. Stay tuned.

As always, comments and contributions welcome and appreciated.