SANTA CLARA, CA –DataStax, the company that delivers Apache Cassandra to the enterprise, today announced the general availability of DataStax DevCenter 1.4, an easy-to-use visual development tool for Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise. DevCenter 1.4, along with recently announced Cassandra 2.2, provides formal support for JSON data management with visual developer capabilities that allows users to easily create, query and navigate JSON data. With the addition of JSON support via DevCenter 1.4, DataStax continues to help empower enterprises with multi-model capabilities that deliver new levels of power and flexibility to web, mobile and IoT applications.

PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS
“Modern online applications are evolving to the point where they require support for multiple data models and data structures inside a single database,” said Robin Schumacher, VP of Product with DataStax. “With DevCenter 1.4 and Cassandra 2.2, DataStax is delivering the ability for developers to smartly store, manage, and query JSON data in Cassandra while enjoying all the other benefits that Cassandra provides with its core data model, write-and-read anywhere design, and linear scale performance capabilities.”

As stated in the January 5, 2015 report, “The Rise Of Polyglot Persistence Demands Your Consideration, authored by Gartner analysts Lakshmi Randall, Nick Heudecker, and Donald Feinberg:

“Polyglot persistence is the use of multiple data stores of different types to persist data in ‘natural fit’ formats, in contrast to retrofitting all data into a relational DBMS (RDBMS).” The report also advises, “a DBMS solution based on a single persistence type is ineffective at supporting business use cases that require the convergence of multiple data formats (such as tabular, textual, graph, temporal, JSON and XML) for analysis, so CIOs and information management (IM) leaders need to assess the value of polyglot persistence.”

SIMPLIFYING DEVELOPMENT WITH JSON
DevCenter 1.4 visually enables developers and administrators to work with the new JSON functionality found in Cassandra 2.2. DevCenter 1.4 supplies intelligent JSON data editors that feature syntax highlighting, code assistance, auto-corrections and smart validations for working with JSON data. DevCenter 1.4 also includes an elegant JSON results viewer that makes it easy to view JSON data with its syntax highlighting and code folding.

INCREASING DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY
In addition to formal JSON support, DevCenter 1.4 and Cassandra 2.2 increase developer productivity and reduce the time it takes to bring new web, mobile and IoT applications to market by supplying the following capabilities:

  • User-Defined Functions and Aggregations: DevCenter 1.4 visually supports Cassandra’s new user-defined functions (UDF’s) and aggregation capabilities, which enable developers to write custom functions and aggregation operations and call them from the application code. Cassandra UDF’s may be visually constructed in DevCenter 1.4 using code snippets.
  • Wizard-driven Object Creation: In addition to existing wizards for managing database objects, DevCenter 1.4 also adds new capabilities to visually create user-defined types and indexes for Cassandra tables.
  • Windows Support: Cassandra 2.2 now formally supports Microsoft Windows. DataStax DevCenter runs on Windows (in addition to Mac and Linux) as well, allowing developers to use Windows as a complete platform for either their development or production work.

Availability
DevCenter 1.4 is available now and can be downloaded from the DataStax website. Cassandra 2.2 is also available for immediate download from Planet Cassandra.