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What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

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Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#31

Post by colin_jack »

bauchidgw wrote: post #26
wavephorm wrote: post #4

I'm not entirely surprised. CouchDB is very clunky and minimalist. And documentation is really, really horrible. The futon UI is a pain to use. I had to write my own library for nodejs because all the existing code I found was terribly written and poorly documented. It just goes on and on. And I like the technology, I persisted and eventually learned to be sort of proficient with CouchDB. But I doubt other people wil…

ad documentation: i bought the oreilly couchdb book to get some decent introduction, and lets just say it made me doubt the editorial standards (if there is such a thing) of oreilly - a lot.

Couldn't agree more, I was amazed that they were prepared to sell a book as bad as that.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#32

Post by wisty »

bauchidgw wrote: post #26
wavephorm wrote: post #4

I'm not entirely surprised. CouchDB is very clunky and minimalist. And documentation is really, really horrible. The futon UI is a pain to use. I had to write my own library for nodejs because all the existing code I found was terribly written and poorly documented. It just goes on and on. And I like the technology, I persisted and eventually learned to be sort of proficient with CouchDB. But I doubt other people wil…

ad documentation: i bought the oreilly couchdb book to get some decent introduction, and lets just say it made me doubt the editorial standards (if there is such a thing) of oreilly - a lot.

You can get it for free. It's basically a series of blog posts (by a number of authors) which tries to explain some of the technical workings of CouchDB, and a few neat things you can do with it. It's kind of deep, but not comprehensive enough, and doesn't really cover the basic practicalities very well.

The wiki is much better if you just want to get stuff working. The book is more for background.

The big issue is they don't seem to treat the documentation and client libraries as a really big deal. Look at a language like Python - it's nothing special, but it's great tutorial and documentation gets it a lot of mindshare. Heck, look at Ruby - it's Python with a bit of syntactic sugar, less libraries, and a slow interpreter. But its documentation (which is great, but offbeat) wins it rabid fans like DHH, who go on to make stuff like Rails, and it's practically a household name.

There's some really neat stuff that only CoucbDB can do, but figuring out how to use it is just a pain.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#34

Post by sirn »

electic wrote: post #33

Why is this post dumb? http://www.google.com/trends?q=MongoDB%2C+sqlite&ctab=0&... Nuff' said.

I don't get it. Is there anything wrong with SQLite being more popular than MongoDB (possibly except the fact that I don't expect to see MongoDB visible in the graph)?

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#35

Post by karmi »

maxogden wrote: post #6

one of couch's strong points is that it is great at giving away your data. most startup bros find that antithetical to their business model

While I understand where you're coming from, Max, this is really dangerous delusion. Couch just lost the drive it had in the beginning, for whatever reasons, crazy focus on "data liberation" and cell phones included.

That said, I agree with @dasil003 above that Couch played a irreplaceable role in getting people on the NoSQL track. I speak from my own experience. Compared to Mongo, Couch allowed me to wrap my head about design differences in the NoSQL world.

It's sad to see Couch fade into obscurity, but hey!, it's initial drive, it's original story (cf. the Rubyfringe video of Damien's talk), is an important part of "NoSQL archeology" for me.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#36

Post by yxhuvud »

mark242 wrote: post #19
rkalla wrote: post #12

A lot of this is the result of the confusion in the community, there is the CouchDB Apache project, then the CouchBase work and their own "Single Server" releases that don't necessarily map 1:1 to the Apache versions. Then there is the CouchBase "Couch Server" offering which, from what little I can tell, is membase + CouchDB and their CouchDB build, according to their docs, isn't 100% 1:1 with the Apache CouchDB buil…

Couchbase offers 3 products -- Couchbase Server (which is Membase, with an instance of CouchDB for persistant storage). Couchbase Single Server (which is CouchDB plus Geocouch plus a few other addons). Couchbase Mobile (self-explanatory). My understanding is that version 3.0 will probably merge the Membase and Couchbase products into one, so you'll have Couchbase and Couchbase mobile. BigCouch is a separate product f…

Hmm. I thought Riak also had master-master replication.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#37

Post by rdtsc »

wavephorm wrote: post #4

I'm not entirely surprised. CouchDB is very clunky and minimalist. And documentation is really, really horrible. The futon UI is a pain to use. I had to write my own library for nodejs because all the existing code I found was terribly written and poorly documented. It just goes on and on. And I like the technology, I persisted and eventually learned to be sort of proficient with CouchDB. But I doubt other people wil…

> The futon UI is a pain to use.

Interesting I had quite the opposite experience. It found it quite a bit better than any other NoSQL database UIs. Someone even copied it for MongoDB and stuck it on top of it.

Why do you think it was pain? And what NoSQL DB UIs have you found to be better and why?

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#38

Post by mml »

foxylad wrote: post #17
mehwoot wrote: post #13

Google trends is not the sole decided of popularity. http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django&c... Do you really think that ruby on rails has been declining in popularity since 2006?

Quite possibly. The Twitter debacle tainted RoR's reputation (fairly or not), and there is a concern that Ruby might turn out to be a flash in the pan. Django/Python is just as effective, and enterprises feel far more comfortable with Python's depth of support across the board. Google's real fail is the event tags - a grand total of NONE relate to Django the web framework.

Yes, Rails is now "acceptable" technology at places like banks (to wit: wells fargo). I never thought I'd see the day.

Time to switch frameworks i guess :/

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#39

Post by strmpnk »

mark242 wrote: post #8

Go to one of the http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-world-tour CouchConf days and ask your question again. The San Francisco edition was exciting; anyone know how New York turned out?

It was smaller scale but really polished. The content was more complete in NYC where SF was just making announcements of really alpha products. (I spoke at both and can say my own talk got a lot better).

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#40

Post by jerfelix »

dasil003 wrote: post #15
mehwoot wrote: post #13

Google trends is not the sole decided of popularity. http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django&c... Do you really think that ruby on rails has been declining in popularity since 2006?

Valid point, but the Django comparison is a red herring as most of those searches have nothing to do with the framework.

Django Unchained has a bit of a blip (which you can see in the totals), but I don't think it significantly changes the overall analysis.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django%2C+dj...

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