Hi, My name is Paul Gydos,
Although I have general background as a computer user and am a bit more advanced than your average user, I have more interest than technical background. Starting a few months back I realized that what was keeping me from expanding my reach in my projects was my ability to store and retrieve information in a way that made sense. I had tried using Access many years back, when I was still owning a license to Office and more often on the Windows platform. Even then I found it frustrating because the criteria for each major entry would change often, I couldn't predict that at the beginning of the project. Even Excel often didn't make sense for simpler projects. I was most often just storing and retrieving, not making calculations or formula. Two dimensions was not always convenient... well anyway I've always had various ideas about data bouncing around in my head. So as I approached my latest problem I started to play around with OpenOffice since I've become a linux distro hopper, and realized I hate it. This particular application will be used by me and my wife often if we are to be successful and it just better not suck all the time trying to keep up with our data. So I found out about couchdb in a linux journal I was thumbing thru, had a small mention of it, but I looked it up and started reading about NoSQL which I had only heard as a term before. It was exciting to see that although this has been in the works for some time, it was still just maturing, and CouchDB seemed to be at the front. Plus the couchdb people seemed to want to make a non-fun thing fun. I wanted a hosted solution so I could work from anywhere as I built up the structure. Right at that moment couchdb hit 1.0 and couchone opened up. Seemed like a good time to get started with this. This is what I find funny about all about all of you: You say things like, All you need to know is html and javascript and you are good to go - Relax! Let me tell you now, my html experience is almost completely nothing. My JavaScript experience is actually nothing. That doesn't mean I'm abnormal. Many experienced users have never had to do more than cut and paste a bit of html at best. Because many people who need to store and retrieve data are not webdesigners, and when we have to post something on the web we can use a simple tool that will make the html and css for us like a blog or a cms thingy. Learning html and javascript is daunting. I never heard of JSON before in my life - Most normal people haven't. So for someone outside of the JavaScript world this means only that you dropped the A in a horror movie character's name. REST to normal people is what people do when they aren't doing this kind of mind numbing work - not pushing, pulling, updating, and deleting data. (Just because I demonstrated that I have some knowledge of this term doesn't mean I yet know how to do it) I lay this out there because after looking at the links to help documents and not finding exactly what I needed I joined the user's listserv to see where other people where at, (I purposely didn't join the developers list). Then I've just sort of sat back and observed this community. The veneer of how 'restful' and 'relaxing' this is cracked immediately. 95% of the time I have absolutely no idea what you all are talking about. You don't even usually preface where your code is coming from and what its acting on. I've taken a few notes where stuff might give me a clue, but I wanted to take a pulse of whom I'm writting to before I ask any questions. The worst is when you watch some technical tutorial that assumes you have had about three layers of education on technically specific topics prior to it and through out the video the speaker says things like, "wasn't that easy" I am not going to apologize for my inexperience and put that well worn label on myself. I've been using home computers since the time you would couple a phone's handset to the side of your typewriter like terminal. Still I'm not scared, somehow I think that couchdb will be a solution for me for something, If not my original application. So I've started studying html and even a bit of javascript, although I think I still don't know anything. I have two distinct problems just to start with which I will put in seperate posts following this. I hope whomever answers realizes that they shouldn't assume I understand anything. Anyway happy couching y'all. I get the feeling eventually this document database platform will be more accessible and those funny words you all decided to attach to your marketing won't seem so ironic to the REST of us. Paul Gydos
