Hi Nate, Looks really interesting and I'll be interested to play with it. You asked about python and CouchDB - our project (www.learningregistry.org) is using a python middle tier and couchdb backend.
I'm particularly interested in Fermata as you mention you're working on OAUTH. If you start to work on crypto signatures (part of OAUTH 1) please ping me -- we use JSON crypto signing for our couch docs, but currently don't have a way to do signing in javascript (we wrote utils for php and python so far). It would be a big deal if we had a way to do that from Javascript as it would permit client-side crypto, but that seems to be a hard problem until projects like "verified email" from Mozilla get further off the ground.. Off topic, so ping me at [email protected] if you want to chat about that issue at all. Thanks for the contribution! Steve On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Nathan Vander Wilt <[email protected]> wrote: > I was given some encouragement at CouchConf to announce my little REST > library that's been working beautifully for CouchDB clients (and more): > https://github.com/andyet/fermata (single <script> include with no compile, > and/or `npm install fermata`) > > > Why did I bother building yet another JavaScipt HTTP library? I grew tired of > building URL strings like `var url = "http://"; + myServer + '/' + myApp + > "_view/by_date?reduce=false&startkey=" + > encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([2001,1])) + "&limit=" + myLimit` — and > then this spring I finally noticed that JavaScript's object/method syntax > matches REST so much better than passing strings/dictionaries to functions > like `$.ajax()`. > > With Fermata it's really easy to access CouchDB from a browser: > > var photoDB = fermata.api({url:"http://localhost:5984"})('photos'); > var photosIndexed = photoDB(['_design/shutterstem', '_view']); > > photosIndexed('by_date')({group_level:3}).get(function (err,data) { > console.log(data.rows); > // ... > }); > > photosIndexed('by_date')({reduce:false, limit:500, > include_docs:true}).get(function (e,d) { > var thumbs = d3.select('#content').selectAll('.frame').data(d.rows); > thumbs.enter().append('div').classed('frame', > true).append('img').classed('photo', true) > .attr('src', function (d) { return photoDB([d.id, > 'thumbnail/64.jpg'])(); }); > }); > > In node.js the syntax is even cleaner, thanks to Harmony Proxy objects: > > var myCouch = fermata.api({url:"http://localhost:5984"}); > var indexedPhotos = myCouch.photos[appName]._view; > > indexedPhotos.by_date({reduce:false, $startkey=[2011,1], > $endkey=[2012]}).get(function (e,d) { console.log(d); }); > > Of course the "broswer" syntax works in node.js server code too, but it's > pretty fun to pretend that any REST API is just a local JavaScript object. > (The dot syntax does actually work in Firefox and soon Chrome, but for > clientside or mixed code I recommend sticking to parentheses for > compatibility.) My teammates at @andyet keep encouraging me that Fermata's > subtle differences really are a big deal in practice: we can assign, extend > and access URLs throughout our code as if they were (virtual) nested > JavaScript objects. > > I'm currently working on plugin support (for sending XML, OAuth signatures, > etc.) but that's getting off-topic for this list: Fermata already works great > with CouchDB and I hope some of you will find it as useful as we have. Would > love to hear your feedback! > > regards, > -natevw > > p.s. are many people using CouchDB from Python? ;-)
