Victor, The CouchDB book, for all its glory, is heavily weighted toward CouchApps. I recommend having a look at http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Basics, which lists interfaces to CouchDB from many many programming languages other than javascript and friends. If you do your image or audio/video processing in one of those (or other) languages, CouchDB is readily available to be the document-based, distributed/replicatable and scalable database that it is. As it says in the CouchApp readme, 'CouchApp /is by no means the only way to use CouchDB.' /It just happens to be way that is best documented in the CouchDB book.
So yes, while I agree that CouchDB may be somewhat limited in what it can do as a 'a true "application" development platform' out of the box, CouchDB to me is about a lot more than thinking inside the box. Cheers, Eric On 11/08/10 18:43, Victor Stan wrote: > So in going through the CouchDB book, and playing a bit more with it, > as well as thinking about the needs of my own projects I came to > realize that perhaps there are some things that I need to better > understand or that couch db may not be able to handle because of it's > inherent nature. I will like it of you folks helped me shed some light > on these discoveries/opinions... > > The way I see it now, Couch DB is a really good platform for creating > highly scalable apps that are restricted to the data in the database, > and whatever JavaScript can do in a web browser. This means that Couch > DB can do anything that is implemented in a web browser like HTML, > CSS, SVG, Web3D/webGL(in the future/nightly builds) and whatever > documents exist in the database. > > However, what CouchDB can't handle is anything that needs to be > computed, which relies on specific libraries, outside the scope of > CouchDB itself, such as for example, image processing, video/audio > processing/encoding, cryptography(although maybe some js options > exist) > > This means that CouchDB can excell at information and data that is > stored exactly in the way that it is meant to be displayed (if it is > not computed on the fly, or text) but can't handle any 'heavy' > computation on binary data. This would limit the extend that CouchApp > can be seen as a true 'application' development platform, to the > extent that it is pretty much limited to dealing with database > introspection, input/output, but no complex computation (that is > beyond map/reduce)... > > How much of that is right/wrong? > > > I appreciate all enlightening information from you! > > Victor Stan >
