@lyubent

This post is a quick overview of my experience of trying to build a platform independent application that uses Cassandra (I say platform independent, but what I mean is that Ubuntu, OSX and Win7/8 are supported).

Issues

• Permission - Unix based systems enforce permissions tightly and prevent usage of the /var/log and /var/lib directories without root access.
• System configurations - Windows requires the CASSANDRA_HOME environment variable to be configured.
• Dependencies - JDK is required for Cassandra so the fact that OSX ships with the developer tools is very handy, however if a specific JDK is required, replacing OSX's default can be problematic.

Epic Workarounds Solutions!

Permissions

Since each Casstor uses has a Cassandra node running on their local account it couldn't be expected that users would have root / administrator access so the data directories were placed on the user's desktop.

System configurations

Because no environment variables are required by UNIX based systems, there wasn't much of a problem, and for windows the CASSANDRA_HOME variable will be added by a batch file (dos script) using the setx command in two ways, first an attempt is made to set a system level environment variable, if that fails than a user level environment variable is added:
C:> setx -m CASSANDRA_HOME "C:\Users\%username%\Desktop\cassandra"
C:> setx CASSANDRA_HOME "C:\Users\%username%\Desktop\cassandra

Dependencies

In the windows branch of the application a warning message is displayed that Cassandra will not start if a runtime is unavailable. Also launch4j was used to allow simple JDK downloading if required.