Hi all,
during the last year, I have been working on and off on couple of Ruby
contracts/projects using CouchDB as the primary database.
Encountering Couch was probably the _most_ joyful experience in the
"developer" part of my life, during that year, *period*.
_Working_ with Couch in Ruby/Rails apps was _highly frustrating_
experience during that time.
I have summarized some of the issues I had/have in the following gist:
--> http://gist.github.com/503660
The points include "too many gems", "too many layers", "lack of
modularization" and "talking to the rest of Ruby world". I've put them
in the gist and not on this list mainly because I don't know if all
people interested are subscribed to this list. I welcome any feedback
here, but _rather_ in comments to the gist.
One thing I'd propose is some virtual (or real) get together of
authors of various Ruby gems for Couch to consider if there's not some
common ground, and if the features of different libraries could not be
catered in a radically smaller number of gems.
Regarding the (natural) "one size does not fit all" argument: the
situation reminds of the state of i18n in Ruby on Rails two years ago.
There were number of options for providing the functionality, because
"everybody has different needs". This has put a really _big_ strain on
developers, forcing them to research and evaluate all the options and
make the choices. In the end, thanks to coordinated effort, common
ground was found and a modular, but "out of the box" usable solution
was created: http://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n.
I think adoption rate, and more importantly _joy_, of using Couch in
Ruby would benefit from something similar.
Best,
Karel
--
www.karmi.cz
