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Sender: Eric Carlson <ericpcarlson@gmail.com>
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Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 01:07:21 +0100
From: Eric Carlson <eric@ericcarlson.co.uk>
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To: user@couchdb.apache.org
Subject: Re: CouchDB Huh! What is it good for?
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 Victor,

The CouchDB book, for all its glory, is heavily weighted toward
CouchApps. I recommend having a look at
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Basics, which lists interfaces to CouchDB
from many many programming languages other than javascript and friends.
If you do your image or audio/video processing in one of those (or
other) languages, CouchDB is readily available to be the document-based,
distributed/replicatable and scalable database that it is. As it says in
the CouchApp readme, 'CouchApp /is by no means the only way to use
CouchDB.' /It just happens to be way that is best documented in the
CouchDB book.

So yes, while I agree that CouchDB may be somewhat limited in what it
can do as a 'a true "application" development platform' out of the box,
CouchDB to me is about a lot more than thinking inside the box.

Cheers,
Eric

On 11/08/10 18:43, Victor Stan wrote:
> So in going through the CouchDB book, and playing a bit more with it,
> as well as thinking about the needs of my own projects I came to
> realize that perhaps there are some things that I need to better
> understand or that couch db may not be able to handle because of it's
> inherent nature. I will like it of you folks helped me shed some light
> on these discoveries/opinions...
>
> The way I see it now, Couch DB is a really good platform for creating
> highly scalable apps that are restricted to the data in the database,
> and whatever JavaScript can do in a web browser. This means that Couch
> DB can do anything that is implemented in a web browser like HTML,
> CSS, SVG, Web3D/webGL(in the future/nightly builds) and whatever
> documents exist in the database.
>
> However, what CouchDB can't handle is anything that needs to be
> computed, which relies on specific libraries, outside the scope of
> CouchDB itself, such as for example, image processing, video/audio
> processing/encoding, cryptography(although maybe some js options
> exist)
>
> This means that CouchDB can excell at information and data that is
> stored exactly in the way that it is meant to be displayed (if it is
> not computed on the fly, or text) but can't handle any 'heavy'
> computation on binary data. This would limit the extend that CouchApp
> can be seen as a true 'application' development platform, to the
> extent that it is pretty much limited to dealing with database
> introspection, input/output, but no complex computation (that is
> beyond map/reduce)...
>
> How much of that is right/wrong?
>
>
> I appreciate all enlightening information from you!
>
> Victor Stan
>

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