DataStax’s Stargate open-framework data gateway, recently released as a technical preview, aims to enable developers to easily work with different data formats and query types, whether JSON, GraphQL, SQL or whatever.

Stargate is, of course, built on Apache Cassandra, Stargate’s flagship NoSQL database. It was designed to alleviate “read the manual” fatigue for each new project, according to a blog post introducing its implementation of Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and a REST API for CRUD access to data in tables.

However, the team envisions a day soon when Stargate users don’t necessarily have to know CQL and is working toward a more agnostic framework that enables community members to create extension modules.

“The direction that we want to move in is abstracting [away] those Cassandra-specific concepts entirely, such that the application developer’s only thinking is in terms of their application and their application objects. So what that means is, they tell us what their books, their authors, their posts, whatever, are, [and] we take that and transparently map that into the database, specifically, in this case, it’s Cassandra,” said Chris Splinter, senior product officer, open source for DataStax.

The project has since released a GraphQL API and a Documents API, which lets most Cassandra distros work with JSON through a REST API.

Plays Nicely with Microservices

“Developers actually don’t directly use a database. They use a database API. Typically the way that they used to do that was through drivers and things like JDBC [Java Database Connectivity] and a bunch of things like that,” said Ed Anuff, chief product officer for DataStax. “But increasingly … that’s not how they think about data. They think about data in terms of, ‘Can I use an API? Can I use a REST API? Can I have a microservice that surfaces data for my applications?’”

A data gateway, “takes your database and makes it play well within a microservice architecture,” he said.

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