> On May 6, 2015, at 8:49 AM, Giovanni Lenzi <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Jan: wants to remove Couchapp name and design doc functions because it
> finds them to be source of confusion

I understand there has been some hinting that show/list functions will be 
deprecated, is this what you are referring to?

To me, a CouchApp is not a script that conveniently loads all of your code into 
CouchDB, it is the notion that all you need to run your web app is a CouchDB 
instance. It is the concept of having everything you need in the design 
documents and server configuration.

Personally, one of the original reasons for me being attracted to CouchDB was 
the ability to implement nearly everything a web server can do in the design 
docs. Show and list functions seemed like a brilliant idea, but in practice 
they were hard to write because of the default Javascript environment. Also, 
others have complained of the performance. I wish there was a way to improve 
that design, not remove it.

Recently I have been implementing more and more functionality in Go/Python/Node 
and using a reverse proxy to expose the API of Couch that I like. I feel this 
is not good for CouchDB. If all I’m using Couch for is a simple document 
database, there are plenty of faster alternatives out there. When I think of 
CouchDB, I think about how it is “of the web” and has these brilliant design 
document strategies that FORCE the user to efficiently create side-effect free 
transformations of documents and views that work nicely with proxies, etc. 
Before CouchDB, I never cared about the etag and didn’t use all of the HTTP 
methods and return codes properly. I didn’t think REST-fully.

Having a system that structures your code, prevents you from doing stupid 
non-scaleable things, and forces you to think REST-fully is superior to just 
winging it free-form in an anything-goes programming environment (unless you’re 
awesome, but most of us are not). I would like to see more features that FORCE 
web developers to create a proper RESTful webapp and reinforce the original 
concept that CouchDB is a pure phenomenon of the web. Or maybe I’m completely 
off. That being said: “LOVE LIVE COUCHAPPS!!!"

-- 
Paul Okstad
http://pokstad.com

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