The motivation behind using MIME multipart for replication was to
allow a document and all its attachments to be transmitted in one go
without having to do Base 64 encoding. I haven't done any work on
this topic, perhaps others have.
Cool stuff, though!
Adam
On Aug 6, 2009, at 4:52 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
Definitely some interesting points here. There have been discussions
on using multipart-mime messaging in the replication protocol which
could setup for some interesting prospects like this. I'm not sure on
specifics in terms of replication, but having an endpoint that allows
edits via multipart-mime could be a very fun thing to play with.
Also, AFAIK there's nothing that prevents an isomorphic
representation. As you point out, couchdb-python handles everything
just fine here.
Paul Davis
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Nitin Borwankar<[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi guys,
I see that the python based dump/load uses MIME multipart docs as
an on-disk
serialisation format for couchdb databases.
An overall question then arises - can CouchDB be considered a MIME
database
which oh also happens to talk JSON?
So before that - is there a 1-1 strong correspondence between a
CouchDB
document and a MIME multipart, or are there things around the edges
that are
crufty - I would assume a strong correspondence since dump/load
uses it and
I haven't seen any caveast about document content that is not
dumpable.
So assuming the 1-1 correspondence - could one use some
"translation layer"
couchapp that accepts arbitrary content/type + multipart-mixed MIME
object
over HTTP and then transparenty serialise them to JSON underneath.
Given that dump/load already does this - it would see that there
are no
obvious glaring flaws in this logic - but I have been known to be
wrong,
once :-).
If this is indeed feasible - then each CouchDB + MIME-trans becomes
a web
mail node - and Couch begins to be the platform for a messaging
revolution
as well as an application revolution. I am thinking now not as
CouchDB for
backing up your email - but CouchDB as your mail client/server for
p2p MIME
based "email".
Permissions etc are important to avoid complete disaster of course
- but
private high quality communication that just reuses existing message
formats, with better storage and transport would seem like an idea
whose
time has come a long time ago and has been knocking at the door for a
decade.
Yes, yes, there's the issue of spam - so see the P.S.
Just a few idle thoughts,
Nitin
P.S. Back in 1998 I tried to convince Sybase to have MIME as a
native type
in the db and it even got speced out ( I have the spec with the
date on it!
) but got canned becous ethe VP of enginnering wanted to know "what
was the
market exactly for this kind of stuff". Other than that I was
granted a
patent for doing p2p discussions over email back in 2003 - I let it
expire
for multiple reasons. So I am somewhat non-naive about and aware
of the
issues and pitfalls around this sort of thinking. At the same time
I am of
the strong belief that when one looks at messages as data to be
moved around
between endpoints with well defined addressing schemes, and one
ignores the
protocols for a bit, then all sorts of fun things start to happen.
37% of all statistics are made up on the spot
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nitin Borwankar
[email protected]
