Steve Sanderson gets it for sure

I was happy to read these two quotes from Steve Sanderson’s new blog post: Oh CouchDB, Why Do I Love Thee So…? (Emphasis mine, throughout)

For a piece of ‘middleware’, CouchDB has great elegance and great congruence with the bevy of potential uses, i.e. it appears to afford us the possibility to think about our problem/solution domains and our softwares internal models in in very similar fashions – with some very interesting beneficial side-effects (e.g. eventual consistency, availability)

This is what excited me about CouchDB when I was first hearing about it. It’s. all. just. the. web. Only with a sexy scalable BTree storage model and Map Reduce.

The second quote gets to the heart of the most revolutionary (well it’s an old idea, but it’s gonna work this time) aspect of peer-based distributed systems:

A CouchDB instance is sufficiently capable to become an application platform and that via the synchronization model, multiple instances of an application could run in a distributed & isolated manner and then synchronize and migrate as needed to different environments, i.e. run locally on laptops and sync and migrate up to centralized servers and then back down as needed. Instead of a rigid & pre-defined deployment structure, it’s more of an organic ’shape’ adjusting as needed. If this is a new degree of freedom, the potential is huge.

This was the part that surprised me, as I started to get more familiar with CouchDB. I’m still not sure what CouchApps are gonna look like, but exploring the potential is a great way to spend a winter break. Look for a walk-through on some RESTful blog software with our next book update.