Very interesting Chris, Personnally, I not yet to use CouchApp nor _show nor _ list in a real projects, but i have played with in order to see how it's working. Also a a background i played also with sling ( http://incubator.apache.org/sling) that is (purist please it's just to simplify) a restful framework on top of JCR like Jackrabbit. For my projects, i still stick to a custom php mvc framework on top of couchDB. Based on these experiences i find CouchApp interesting but still lacking "usability" and "friendness"
First of all concerning the points you are pointing to : One way to fix this it to give the resources made available by a > design document a common root. This means we can use hrefs like > "_show/docid" to link to a show function from an attachment. So we > get paths like this: > > /db/_design/foo/_view/bar?limit=10 > /db/_design/foo/_show/docid > /db/_design/foo/index.html > > The downside is that the URLs are longer (and that the change would > break all clients), the upside is the ability to link from one to the > other (and thus be part of the web). I think you describe good solution as far as you want to keep CouchApp non intrusive to CouchDB. I would add as a downside that URL are becoming uglier (or non friendly). If it can be more intrusive, the best would be (at least for html document) a regexp like function in CouchDB to set the <base> allowing to use relative url afterwards. == A related question == > > The question raised by all of this is how closely do we want CouchDB > to be intertwined with CouchApp? I will make a stupid answer but for sure the more intrusive it is the easier it will be to tweak CouchDB Also if not intrusive, some basic views (if we could retrieve _design docs in a view) could be created by people using CouchApp in order to automatically retrieve the apps to show in Futon. Now what i think would be great for CouchApp (based on more intrusive CouchApp) would be to make the url prettier permit the call of /db/_show/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid?format=xml or /db/_show/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid?format=html or /db/_show/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid?format=wap by db/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid.xml db/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid.html /db/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid.wap the algo would be CouchDB try to get tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid.xml in the base db, if not found it will try to find _show/tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid and the extension would be passed in the request object being able to specify multiple aliasid in a document that would point to a designdoc and a functionname to apply to the doc, the mapping between aliasid tinydesigndocid/functionname/docid being easy to catch through a view being able to remove the _list for the list The whole idea is to allow the use of "pretty url" with couch using an algo to map to the good docid, show docid, or list. An other improvement (still intrusive) is to permit to define in _show and _list a list of view/list/ whose results would be passed to the _show and _list called function in order to give more power to these functions. In fact, i implemented all these functionnalities (plus security, plus....) in the php mvc i'm using, and it tends to be quite efficient, but not as much as if it were included in couchApp already. Regards
