Slouch on the CouchDB

No doubt you will know about the new generation of document oriented databases designed to work using the HTTP protocol, such as Mongo and CouchDB. They come pretty much with a built in API! So it’s time to mess around with it!

I downloaded Couchbase Server community edition (which is pretty nifty I’ll admit). Once you get that installed you can access localhost on port 8091 and it will take you into a cool looking admin panel:

One of the admin screens on couchbase server

It comes with a sample database, and you can access the API on port 8092. The full range of ports is as follows:

Port	Description	Node to Node	Node to Client	Cluster Administration	XDCR
8091	Web Administration Port	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
8092	Couchbase API Port	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
11209	Internal Cluster Port	Yes	No	No	No
11210	Internal Cluster Port	Yes	Yes	No	No
11211	Client interface (proxy)	Yes	Yes	No	No
4369	Erlang Port Mapper (epmd)	Yes	No	No	No
21100 to 21199 (inclusive)	Node data exchange	Yes	No	No	No

There are some great videos at http://www.relaxed.tv that show you how couch works. This is the introductory video:

The curl syntax should be something like:

curl  localhost:8092/
{"couchdb":"Welcome","version":"1.2.0a-be4fa61-git","couchbase":"2.0.0-1976-rel-community"}

As you can know, being able to query a database and perform CRUD over HTTP would be incredibly useful, so this is very promising!

It’s stupid O’clock and I’ve been up all night but this looks great! I will update this post when I return to have a play with my new toy! 🙂