I think this question on stack overflow expresses a lot of the confusion in the marketplace about the current direction of couchdb. I hope you'll forgive me posting this to the dev group, but as a couch evangelist myself, I share Jonathan's pain.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9343868/confused-on-how-to-use-couchdb-on-android I am feeling a bit more confident about the future of couchdb having seen the activity in this forum over the past week. However I feel, looking from the outside in, that the project does have a perception problem. The problem I think largely stems from the fact that there is nothing on this page that reflects the online discussions that arose following Damien's departure. http://couchdb.apache.org/ So when you are searching for information on couchdb, you tend to see a very stale project page, and then lots of much more recent online posts elsewhere asking if couch is dead now that the founder has left. I know there is a lot of sensible and sane discussion on other blogs, but I really feel that the apache couchdb pages need to address the matter head on and inform the community better as to the future. As an aside, the decision to rebrand membase as couchbase has, in my opinion, done untold damage. This is the real issue behind the confusion and is something I think the couchdb project needs to work on. I'm happy to help where I can ... I love couch and use it as the backend for many of my mobile projects. Having a restful database that talks JSON is such a perfect fit for so many applications that really, couchdb should be storming ahead of other nosql options and yet I find myself having to work harder and harder to justify its use over (say) mongo. The reason I am having to work harder is purely a perception problem and hence I feel this is the area that needs a bit more work! All that said, I'm so glad I joined the dev group last week, it's given me a lot more confidence that things are moving in a positive direction ... Roger
