To illustrate how easy and straightforward writing applications for CouchDB is, we are going to build a simple todo-list application in Javascript. You should be familiar with HTML and Javascript and the DOM. You do not need any Ajax experience. Although we are going to use it, all will be abstracted away.

The interface is quite plain, as is the functionality. This is only to demonstrate how to work with CouchDB and not meant as a real application. We could turn this into something nice with some spit & polish.

How it works

We take a top level view here, working our way from the user’s perspective down to the actual code. This ensures we do not screw up the …

CouchDB got its own TCP port assignment from the IANA. Yeah! The latest release (0.7.2) already configures your default installation to use this port and the accompanying documentation and the wiki should be up to date as well. A big thanks to Noah Slater for taking care of the procedure.

Oh, and it is 5984.

Damien Katz and the CouchDB development team are proud to announce:

CouchDB version 0.7.0 is now available.

This release is a major milestone in the project’s history.

Key features include:

• a REST API using JSON instead of XML for data transport,
• a JavaScript view engine based on Mozilla Spidermonkey,
• a GNU Autotools build system supporting most POSIX systems (Noah Slater),
• a built-in …

Thank you Frankfurt, what an evening! Thanks a lot for the invitation and my trip-sponsors. In fact the people and venue were so nice, I am seriously looking for an excuse to go again.

For housekeeping, here are the promised slides (PDF, 0.662 MB, sans images). In Some Context I wrote:

I rarely see the point of posting the slides of a presentation for people who didn’t see the original presentation. Yet, this is often requested. I don’t have a problem with posting my […] slides […], but they are of little value without context and I do have a problem with posting things of little value, so here’s the context.

And it goes on to comment the slides I used for my CouchDB presentation in Zurich. The new slides are …

The kind folks at the PHP Usergroup Frankfurt invited me to talk about CouchDB. We meet on November 8th between 19:30 and 20:00 at the Brotfabrik in Frankfurt. If you are in the area and like to hear about CouchDB, feel free to join us.

I will be presenting CouchDB’s core concepts, its recent improvements and the programming interface to give you an overview. Building on that, I will explain how to architect CouchDB applications and show best practices for writing them not forgetting how to do all that from PHP.

In case you forgot:

CouchDB is designed for highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant systems. The core principles for scaling database applications are the foundation of CouchDB’s feature set. It supports on- and offline replication, data …

As I mentioned in the Post Scriptum of an earlier post, JavaScript is not the only language that you can create CouchDB views with. You can now use PHP, too.

Here is how views work again: You specify a JavaScript function that receives a document parameter (which is a JSON object). You can do whatever to that object and return it again. Or you don’t return anything. When a new document is added to a CouchDB database, it gets passed to the JavaScript function and, depending on its return value, is included into the view that is associated with the function &endash; or not.

function(doc)
{
  if("Value" == doc.field) {
   return doc;
  }
}

This function adds the full document to the view when it has a field called field and when that has the value Value. This is just a refresher on how views work …

I just sent this message to the brand new CouchDb mailinglist:

Dear Couch Potatoes (or something), I updated the CouchDb PHP Library and the Demo application BugShrink (our bug-tracker) to the new JSON API.

They are up in a separate Google Code Project. Check out the code at http://couchprojects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ and the project pages at http://code.google.com/p/couchprojects/.

Enjoy, Jan

While not yet released, the current SVN version of CouchDb is …