From the webpage:
Since Aryabhatta invented zero, Mathematicians such as John von Neuman have been in pursuit of efficient counting and architects have constantly built systems that computes counts quicker. In this age of social media, where 100s of 1000s events take place every second, we were inspired by twitter’s Rainbird project to develop distributed counting engine that can scale linearly.
Countandra is a hierarchical distributed counting engine on top of Cassandra (to increment/decrement hierarchical data) and Netty (HTTP Based Interface). It provides a complete http based interface to both posting events and getting queries. The syntax of a event posting is done in a FORMS compatible way. The result of the query is emitted in JSON to make it maniputable by browsers directly.
Features
- Geographically distributed counting.
- Easy Http Based interface to insert counts.
- Hierarchical counting such as com.mywebsite.music.
- Retrieves counts, sums and square in near real time.
- Simple Http queries provides desired output in JSON format
- Queries can be sliced by period such as LASTHOUR,LASTYEAR and so on for MINUTELY,HOURLY,DAILY,MONTHLY values
- Queries can be classified for anything in hierarchy such as com, com.mywebsite or com.mywebsite.music
- Open Source and Ready to Use!
Countandra illustrates that not every application need be a general purpose one. Countandra is designed to be a counting engine and to answer defined query types, nothing more.
There is a lesson there for semantic diversity solutions. It is better to attempt to solve part of the semantic diversity issue than to attempt a solution for everyone. At least partial solutions have a chance of being a benefit before being surpassed by changing technologies and semantics.
BTW, Countandra using a Java long for time values so in the words of the Unix Time Wikipedia entry:
In the negative direction, this goes back more than twenty times the age of the universe, and so suffices. In the positive direction, whether the approximately 293 billion representable years is truly sufficient depends on the ultimate fate of the universe, but it is certainly adequate for most practical purposes.
Rather than “suffices” and “most practical purposes” I would have said, “is adequate for present purposes” in both cases.