What the HTTP is CouchApp?

Calling the standard stack "fragile custom code" doesn't do much for their credibility here. I mean, really. Fragile?

map reduce for a blog - brilliant!<p>now in the real world:<p><pre><code> select data from this_table and this_table and this_table and that_table where there was no previously defined relationship but users need this data with the new relationship and have it done in a few minutes</code></pre>

So have any real world applications successfully used this as a framework?<p>It looks interesting but I see any moderately complex web app, i.e. more than CRUD, hitting a wall of complexity when using CouchApp as a base. You eliminate so called "fragile custom code" up until the point where the framework doesn't support something and you need the custom code anyway, except now there is the overhead of getting custom code working together with everything else. At which point you wonder what was the point?

CouchApp really is excellent marketing, folks, and I congratulate you. As I'm sure you know, any database with an HTTP interface will do exactly the same thing. Riak, for example. I leave you to your normal round of thoughtful, reasoned NoSQL vs RDBMS debate.

Ah, soon we will be writing stored procedures in the database tier to enforce business logic again, like the good (read: miserable) old days.

I wish the couch guys would just focus on integrating the _changes feed into different languages. What I find appealing is their attempt to solve the distributed sync problem. That's useful, but adopting couchdb on all the clients doesn't make much sense. Microsoft's sync framework is moving to allowing full cross language / platform sync. It already allows two-way syncing odata feeds to the iPhone, android, windows phone, and pure javascipt. I don't see why I need build all my clients on couchdb directly to get this functionality. It seems like a nonstarter for 95 percent of use cases.

This project really challenges a lot of my assumptions. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.<p>I'm going to sleep on it.

"Your site can be faster than theirs, if you serve it from localhost."<p>Is there some arcane wisdom in here, or is this just stupidity? Sure, if I run Google on my own computer, and replicate it to my laptop, they will both be very fast... and need quantum HDs for storage.

Apparently, Not Found

Where normally does a couchapp put its application/business logic? At client side javascript?

Not sure how I feel about exposing my database directly to a client. This means all security regarding reading and writing any data must be handled in CouchDB. Not knowing about CouchDB, the existence of CouchApp leads me to believe there must be some way to do this, but I can't see how this would be possible with MySQL or Postgres.<p>Cell level security in a database? Hmm.