CouchDB and CouchApp

As mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to see CouchDB in action and decided to "push" one of the available sample applications into it. CouchDB has a built in web server to support the REST based API CouchDB supports. The developers were smart enough to see its broader use and allow for applications to be uploaded into a database. An application is a set of static HTML files, images, and JavaScripts that can form a fully functional web application, including the data stored directly in that very same database. With CouchDB's built in replication you get a fully distributed application. Sweet!

Sure you will have to install a load balancer in front of multiple instances of CouchDB, but that is a simple engineering task. I am not sure how session handling will work though. Without a somewhat standard session handling framework it may be difficult to build state aware applications. You can save the session in the database of course and reload upon each request. Is it replicated fast enough though for random access to cluster nodes?

Back to the sample application. I chose the Twitter client provided by Chris Anderson from the CouchDB team (btw, his blog is now hosted directly on CouchDB). I got the tar ball from the above GitHub repository and unpacked it. To get it "pushed" into a CouchDB database you need the actual CouchApp as well. Download its tar ball as well and unpack it. Now we can install CouchApp first. I went with the README file provide and tried the Ruby version, installing it as a gem:

$ sudo gem update --system
$ sudo gem install couchapp

While that installed fine, the syntax that you then find for example for the application to be pushed into the database does not match with the Ruby version of CouchApp. After talking to Chris on the IRC channel he advised uninstalling the Ruby version and rather use the Python based version. I uninstalled the gem and ran:

$ sudo easy_install couchapp

Now the syntax of couchapp did match and I was ready to upload the Twitter sample application - or was I?

Not so fast though, every attempt to upload the application resulted in partial failures. I compared what I had in the uploaded database with what Chris had. His had the attachments needed, mine did not. The database has been created but half of the files were missing. After a quick chat with Chris again we realized that he is using the trunk version of CouchDB, I was using the latest release. Mine was simply outdated and was missing the new application extensions. Here are the next steps I had to run:

$ cd /downloads
$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk couchdb
$ cd couchdb/
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure
$ make && sudo make install
$ sudo -i -u couchdb couchdb

and to push the application

$ cd ../jchris-couchdb-twitter-client-6bee14ae1b3525d56d77dd9c114002582dc0abe8
$ couchapp push http://localhost:5984/test-twitter

As expected, the application push did succeed now. I was able to see all the files in the newly created database. The screen shot shows the design view of the new "test-twitter" database. Everything you need to serve the application is there, even the favicon.ico to display in the browsers address bar. If you click on the "index.html" the newly uploaded application is started and after logging into Twitter I had everything running as I wanted it.

Here is the a screen shot of the application running. This is really great. I just have to figure out now for myself how to use it either for work or privately. So many choices - but only 24 hours in a day.