Hector is slowly moving towards CQL integration. The first steps have been made, but because of the experience of an unstable API, the developers seem to have postponed a new release. The CQL API is rather new, as it should be nearly equivalent to a SQL syntax. I made some basic steps with CRUD operations to verify that data could be written and read via CQL.
Nevertheless, the CQL JAR is not usable out of the box like a standard JDBC driver as of now, and misses some important feature aspects. Having a look at the more or less difficult to understand thrift API and the not really much simpler hector API, I am convinced that CQL will be established as the state-of-the-art access API for Cassandra in version 0.8.1 and 1.0, where thrift will remain the native, raw access for some time.
The competition between both APIs has nothing to do with the decision of Hector. Hector itself provides additional services like failure and connection handling in the cluster. These are features being addressed by neither thrift nor CQL.
I don't really believe in all other O/R mappers, or even those claiming to provide a full-fledged JPA. I cannot imagine how this should work.
