“

Hello Damien,

I’ve been following your Blog and the CouchDB development for some time now. Harry Fuecks did a great job re-enkindling my interest in CouchDB a few weeks ago. Your latest post finally tipped me over. The idea is so appealing that the problems need to be found and worked around. It _has_ to work. Only, the different configurations can be a problem, but then, something like a static build, like a standalone application, could be crafted.

I’m pretty familiar with all things PHP that do not happen on Windows, so I can’t help there; I’m rather an Mac OS X guy with a BSD background and I really like to see CouchDB on Unix. I assume that once it is ported to Linux, the adaptation to Mac OS X and the BSDs is just a matter of time. I’m a total newbie to Erlang and the internal design of CouchDB, so I wouldn’t know where (and how) to start.

I know my way around configure and make and all the other buildchain tools on Unix as well as XCode on Mac OS X and I’d like to help out there. Are there any docs on the
CouchDB internals and how a Unix port could be achieved? I guess I need to set up the Erlang environment according to their docs. I’ll do that for starters. Then there is this Fabric and FabricServer thing that only comes with VS project files, but there appears to be Python tool called vsproj2make that could help out. I didn’t spend much time digging here, but it seems to part of the ming project. That’ll be the next step.

Then there needs to be Java for the antlr tool (Which JDK is needed here?) and the ICU library but that does not seem to be a big obstacle. CouchDB itself comes with a VS project file again, so the script above can hep again, perhaps.

Is that a reasonable path to take? Any shortcuts? Anything? :-)

All the best, and thanks for CouchDB!

Jan
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”

This is my first ever email to Damien. Dated October 7th, 2006.

Boy did things look different back then. CouchDB was spelled CouchDb (which I thought was silly so I “corrected” in the mail), it used XML instead of JSON and a custom query language called Fabric which was written in C++. I remember adding a bunch of functions to it at some point.

Getting CouchDB to build finally wasn’t too much of a hassle, but Damien helped a great deal with the C++ bits. I even documented the process back then. I took about a week to set it all up, write a Makefile that would work on Linux and Mac OS X and would live next to the Windows build system.

Here’s what Fabric looked like:

SELECT *
COLUMN CreationDate
COLUMN Subject
COLUMN Message

Jikes, columns.


The post I’m referring to in the beginning is about how CouchDB and PHP could be the foundation for the offline web. I’m sure happy we can do this with JavaScript now (but really any language you like, CouchDB is language agnostic).

I hope you enjoyed our little blast from the past, I know I did!