In a new post today Courtney Robinson shows how the combination of Cassandra, PHPcassa and CodeIgniter can be used to create a large scale PHP application in five minutes .

I'm working on a new project, migrating an existing site using custom code with a very monolithic design on top of MySQL. Design goals : Implement all the same functionality using a manageable framework with a small footprint on a distributed NoSQL database. Small footprint? I'm thinking Code Igniter (CI)...Distributed NoSQL (my favorite part)? I'm thinking Apache Cassandra!!!

The basic idea was to have the CodeIgniter database object (the $this->db) available but still allow the application access to the Cassandra database as well. PHPcassa was the answer. One created configuration file and a custom database library later and the tool was implemented into the CodeIgniter structure.