ReadWriteHack

PouchDB is a new project from former CouchOne (now called Couchbase) employee Mikeal Rogers. It's an attempt to create a full JavaScript implementation of the CouchDB storage and views API to enable peer-to-peer replication with "real" CouchDB instances.

The current version supports the HTML5 data store IndexedDB, and Rogers plans to support LevelDB in the future.

Erlang was created in 1986 for telephony applications. But oddly enough, it's emerged in recent years as an increasingly useful tool for building Web servers, database servers and real-time Web applications because of its concurrency and support for distributed computing.

Facebook uses it to power its real-time chat application. The popular NoSQL databases Apache CouchDB and Riak are both built in Erlang. Companies ranging from Rdio and Voalte are also using it. In fact, Voalte's Benjamin King wrote a blog post about why Erlang is right for healthcare communication.

Webdis is simple Web server that forwards commands to Redis, a NoSQL database, and returns information in formats such as JSON and PubSub. You could use it to build JavaScript applications that interface with Redis without any other middle layer, much like the CouchApps built with Apache CouchDB. It also includes access controls, so that only certain users will have write access to certain areas of the database. CouchApps get around this by giving every user their own database.

Today Couchbase released a developer preview Mobile Couchbase package of CouchDB for iOS. Developers will now be able to use CouchDB in iOS apps, or create CouchApps and deploy them to as iOS apps.

CouchDB is already available for Android.

CouchDB developer Max Ogden explains how he uses vhosts and rewrites in CouchDB to serve up his blog with pretty permalinks instead of long, ugly URLs.

If you want to know more about what Ogden is doing with CouchDB, you can check out our two part interview with him.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

This is the second half of our interview. Part one can be found here. In this half we focus on Couchappspora, Ogden's open source social networking project.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

I recently talked to him about his Code for America fellowship, how he got started programming, CouchDB and much more. Tune in next week for part two of the interview.

The situation in Egypt has colored much of our coverage today, so it's only fitting that we send you into the weekend with some relevant tutorials: an introduction to Ushahidi for developers, tips for optimizing CouchDB and how to create a Tor relay.

Jesse Wolgamott presented at Lone Star Ruby Conference on four major NoSQL databases: CouchDB, MongoDB, RavenDB and SimpleDB. We've covered various comparisons before, such as one by Adrian Cockcroft. And of course there's our own article on the subject: "Is the Relational Database Doomed?" But if you'd rather kick back and watch a conference presentation, then this is for you. It has the benefit of including RavenDB in the comparison, which we haven't covered before.

J Chris Anderson, CFO of CouchOne, has been hosting a curious CouchApp on his personal site: Twebz. Twebz is a "decentralized Twitter client." We were curious about what that meant, so I did an interview with Anderson about the project. He says it's just a demonstration of what CouchApps are capable of. But it also hints at what CouchDB is really trying to accomplish: a radical re-architecting of the Web into a more decentralized system. Read on for the full interview.