Okay, time to ask the question, what features do we need to get to 1.0?
I'm going to list my must haves, and my nice to haves.
Must have:
- Document integrity checking: Using some sort of hashing scheme for
end to end integrity checking of documents and attachments. Reusing
the revision ID as the hash of the document might work, and has the
benefit of allowing writing the same changes to 2 different servers
and not causing a conflict. Also multiple clients can write the same
change to a document and not get unnecessary conflicts.
- Reader/Writer access databases and servers: Allow/disallow
anonymous, users, groups.
- Continuous replication: Keeping a constant connection and being able
to replicate changes as soon as they happen.
- Better testing: We need really some performance and stress testing
as part of the source. And we need much better code coverage in
general with the testing.
Nice to have:
- Hashing/CRC everything written to disk, data, metadata, index
structures, etc. But optional, since many filesystems actively
integrity-check disk data.
- Better full text integration: Out of the box integration and the
ability intersect results with views, for easier result formatting.
Lucene would be the primary FT engine, but we make it pluggable, much
like the view engines are.
- Attachment level replication: By tracking the revision when an
attachment was modified, the replicator can avoid copying unchanged
attachments to the target. The same can apply to json fields, but it's
much less of a win there.
- Partitioning/sharding support: Ideally would be nice to have
something that "just works" without a lot of setup.
- Built-in authentication: A plug-in that authenticates HTTP users and
assign them roles. It would use a couch database as a directory that
contains users documents, etc.
- Selective replication: The ability to replicate a subset of
documents, using a javascript function as a selector.
- Server side doc processing: The ability to POST data and have
arbitrary server-side processing. The simplest case is posting a
document to a Js handler that can do some data cleanup and add default
values the document before saving it. But ideally would be able to
interact with the full database
- Scheduled replication: The ability to schedule replication every so
often, like a cron job. But this can be done with an actual cron job
and CURL, so it's not critical to have it built-in.
There are probably a bunch of things I forgot about.
Respond to this with your must haves and nice to haves. No promises
you'll get your way (no guarantee for me for that matter), but lets
start talking about it.
And anyone who wants to take on any of these issues: mine, yours or
anyone else's, just do it. Read code, mail dev@ with questions and
advice, write some code, repeat.
-Damien
