Paul Carey

One of the many enjoyable aspects of working with CouchDB is the scope it offers for exploration. Developing against CouchDB presents such a different paradigm for working with data that it really does stimulate thought.

I wanted to illustrate this at my talk at LRUG last week. I’d been thinking for some time how useful a graphical document browser would be for CouchDB, and that it would be fairly simple to write one. So, rather than preparing a talk, I spent last Monday writing fuschia. The idea was straightforward - a user enters a seed document id, fuschia displays it, all docs that it links to, and that link to it. Docs are represented by colored nodes, and labelled with their most descriptive attribute (as defined by the user). Click a node to repeat the process.

Given CouchDB’s HTTP interface, UUIDs as identifiers, and an ability to aggregate data with a map function, developing fuschia required just a few dozen lines of core code. Kudos also goes to prefuse, but my relationship with that library is more a love / hate one. Dragons lie on either side of its hidden golden path.

Somewhat predictably, writing fuschia took longer than expected and I didn’t have time to prepare a talk. Which wouldn’t have been so bad had I not forgotten to demo fuschia. Not my finest hour.

While fuschia works well with sample data, using it with real world data didn’t offer the insights I’d hoped for. An ability to filter out data is needed and views offer a natural way to achieve this. Work for the future so…