Really awesome stuff. Great job to all of you who are making it happen. Thank you! & Hacky Holidays
On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I just published the transcript of my CouchDB Conf, Vancouver Keynote ( > https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/the_state_of_couchdb), and I’d > like to share it with you as well. > > My thanks to everyone who helped making this year the success it has been! > <3 > > * * * > > This is a rough transcript of the CouchDB Conf, Vancouver Keynote. > > > ## Welcome > > Good morning everyone. I thank you all for coming on this fine day in > Vancouver. I’m very happy to be here. My name is Jan Lehnardt and I am the > Vice President of Apache CouchDB at the Apache Software Foundation, but > that’s just a fancy title that means I have to do a bunch of extra work > behind the scenes. I’m also a core contributor to Apache CouchDB and I am > the longest active committer to the project at this point. > > I started helping out with CouchDB in 2006 and that feels like a lifetime > ago. We’ve come a long way, we’ve shaped the database industry in a big > way, we went though a phoenix from the ashes time and came out still > inspiring future generations of developers to do great things. > > So it is with great honour that I get to be here on stage before you to > take a look at the state of CouchDB. > > > ## Numbers > > I’d like to start with some numbers: > > - In 2013 we **added 15 committers** to the project, up to a total of 30. > Thats 2x the number of people regularly contributing to CouchDB! > > - The year isn’t yet over, but these committers already created 3x the > commits of 2012. And they have committed more than in any other year in > CouchDB’s history. > > - We have **shipped eight releases**: 1.0.4 1.1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3.0, > 1.3.1, 1,4.0 and 1.5.0 just this year, that is up from one(!) last year. > - thanks to our new release schedule we are getting more features to > more people faster by focusing on small iterative changes forward. > > - 20% more JIRA tickets and 50% more GitHub issues > > We have made a lot of changes in 2012 to make 2013 a great year for > CouchDB and it sure looks like we succeeded and that 2014 is only going to > trump that. > > I’d like to thank everyone on the team for their hard work. > > > ## Currently > > We’ve just shipped CouchDB 1.5.0 last week and it comes with a few > exciting new things as previews, for you to try out and play with and > report any issues with back to us. And that is on top of all the regular > bug fixing and other improvements. > > > 1. A completely new developed admin UI, nicknamed Fauxton, that is poised > to replace the much-loved, but increasingly dated Futon. I’d like to > personally thank the Fauxton team: Sue “Deathbear” Lockwood, Russell > “Chewbranca” Branca, Garren Smith and many more volunteers for their work > as well as the company Cloudant for sponsoring a good chunk of that work. > Great job everyone! Fauxton is going to be replacing Futon in one of the > next few releases and will give us the foundation for the next stage of > CouchDB’s life. > > 2. Plugins. While it was always possible to write plugins for CouchDB, you > kind of had to be an expert in CouchDB to get started. We believe that > writing plugins is a great gateway drug to getting more people to hack on > CouchDB proper, so we made it simpler to build plugins and to install > plugins into a running instance of CouchDB. It is still very early days, we > don’t even have a plugin registry yet, but we are surely excited about the > prospects of installing GeoCouch with a single click of a button in Futon > or Fauxton. We also included a template plugin that you can easily extend > and make your own, along with a guide to get you started. > > The plugins effort also supports a larger trend we are starting to follow > with the CouchDB core codebase: decide on a well-defined core set of > functionality and delegate more esoteric things to a rich plugin system > That means we no longer have to decline the inclusion of useful code like > we’ve done in the past, because it wasn’t applicable to the majority of > CouchDB users. Now we can support fringe features and plugins that are only > useful to a few of our users, but who really need them. > > 3. A Node.JS query server. CouchDB relies on JavaScript for a number of > core features and we want to continue to do so. In order to keep up with > the rapid improvements made to the JavaScript ecosystem we have tentative > plans to switch from a Spidermonkey-driven query server to a V8-driven one. > In addition, the Node.js project has a really good installation story, > something that we had trouble with in the past, and includes a few > utilities that make it very easy for us to switch the query server over. > > All this however is not to blindly follow the latest trends, but to > encourage the community to take on the query server and introduce much > needed improvements. The current view server is a tricky mix of JS, Erlang > and C and we are not seeing many people daring to jump into that. In a > second step we expect these improvements to trickle down to the other query > server implementations like Python or PHP and make things better for > everyone. For now this is also a developer preview and we are inviting all > Node.js developers to join us and build a a better query server. > > 4. Docs landed in 1.4.0, but 1.5.0 is seeing a major update to the now > built-in documentation system. With major thanks to Alexander Shorin, > Dirkjan Ochtmann and Dave Cottlehuber who were instrumental in that effort, > CouchDB now has “really good docs” instead of a “really crappy wiki”, that > are shipped with every release and are integrated with Futon and Fauxton. > > > ## Beyond > > The immediate next area of focus for the CouchDB project is the merging of > two forks: BigCouch and rcouch. > > BigCouch is a [Dynamo]( > http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html) > implementation on top of CouchDB that manages a cluster of machines and > makes them look as a single one, adding performance improvements and fault > tolerance to a CouchDB installation. This is a major step in CouchDB’s > evolution as it was designed for such a system from the start, but the core > project never included a way to use and manage a cluster. Cloudant have > donated their BigCouch codebase to the Apache project already and we are > working on an integration. > > rcouch is a what I would call a “future port” of CouchDB by longtime > committer and contributor Benoit Chesneau. rcouch looks like CouchDB would, > if we started fresh today with a modern architecture. Together with > BigCouch’s improvements, this will thoroughly modernise CouchDB’s codebase > to the latest state of the art of Erlang projects. rcouch also includes a > good number of nifty features that make a great addition to CouchDB’s core > feature set and some great plugins. > > Finally, we’ve just started an effort to set up infrastructure and called > for volunteers to translate the CouchDB documentation and admin interface > into all major languages. Driven by Andy Wenk from Hamburg, we already have > a handful of people signed up to help with translations for a number of > different languages. > > This is going to keep us busy for a bit and we are looking forward to ship > some great releases with these features. > > ## tl;dr > > 2013 was a **phenomenal** year for Apache CouchDB. 2014 is poised to be > even greater, there are more people than ever pushing CouchDB forward and > there is plenty of stuff to do and hopefully, we get to shape some more of > the future of computing. > > Thank you! > > * * * > > Best > Jan > -- > > >
