Hi Mark, I think there is no common approach, as you outlined there are many solutions possible. People use the technologies they already master in-house to do this, and front-end development is therefore usually needed.
Simon's backbone-d3 might be a solution for you. Otherwise to avoid having to develop a front-end yourself, you might want to look at Business Intelligence software. They are good letting users to generate tables / charts the way they want with minimal need of technical intervention, and provide decent interface. Most solutions do *not *support JSON data source, but this is changing rapidly because of big data analysis hype. LuciDB might be a solution for you, it adds a layer between couchdb and some front-end reporting: http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2011/06/22/sql-access-to-couchdb-views-easy-reporting/. I have not tried it myself and have no idea about how good it is. For Pentaho <http://www.pentaho.com/big-data/> and Jaspersoft<http://www.jaspersoft.com/bigdata>, two commercial open source solutions, you might be able to find a plugin developed by the community in order to support couchdb source (if so please let me know, I'm interested also). Your non-technical users would only have to drag and drop the fields they want to generate decent reports / dashboards. Tableau software <http://www.tableausoftware.com> and Qlikview<http://www.qlikview.com/>are good tools you can put in the hands of managers, with close-to-zero technical intervention needed. I let you check whether they would be able to connect to couchdb's REST API... Then, my company is currently working on an analytics tool using data from JSON APIs. We do not have a finished product yet but are interested in talking with potential users to know their requirements. This is not to sell anything, but rather to identify most needed features, and type of analysis which is usually needed. Feel free to get in touch by email whenever you are interested in sharing some details about your use case. Hope this helps, -- * Mehdi El Fadil twitter: @mango_info <http://www.twitter.com/mango_info> website: http://www.mango-is.com linkedin: http://be.linkedin.com/in/elfadme * <http://www.mango-is.com/>
