CouchDB success

It has been a year from my last post, goodness, not a good year, that may be part of it. I have been working with a learning development company for a few months as an interactive developer. Pretty much write code for html courses and work on articulate courses. I was hired to do a MediaWiki site for a major international company. I do some of their web pages too. The other week, I was given an opportunity to develop a site for another company which lists all of their training and is searchable. Simple database, no? No. So my meager MySQL skills were of no use. The programming lingua fraca here are javascript and JQuery, the other developer wanted the output to be a JSON object, and have the database small enough to live anywhere. Soooooo... I did some research and found Couchdb, it is not new and some are moving away from it, but thought I would give it a whirl. What I wanted was a simple input, edit save interface, and the ability to get different readouts of data. Again, nothing too difficult with MySQL, and one would hope not to hard with Couchdb. It turns out to be not too difficult, but getting useful information from most couchdb sites for this project was not easy. The part that was lacking, was how to make an input form. Almost all of the sites wanted you to bulk upload JSON objects to the database. Not going to happen. Most of the examples found were using a command line interface for doing work with the data, not what I wanted. What I will do over a few blog posts is to give simple instructions on how to build this interface and make it work. There are thousands of tutorials on how to install couchdb, so I won't go into that. Before the next post, download and install couchdb and couchapps.