↤ February 01th, 2013
Slides to go with the headings.
Hi, welcome to CouchDB Conf.
CouchDB means a lot to me and it makes me very happy that you are all here today.
My name is Jan Lehnardt and I am the elected project management committee chair of the Apache CouchDB project. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry, it means I sign up to deal with politics and paperwork voluntarily.
I have been with CouchDB since 2006. My first contribution was the initial UNIX build system to CouchDB. I stuck around ever since.
My main job back then was PHP/MySQL consulting and Open Source work as my own 20% project. In 2007, I started giving talks about CouchDB at user groups and conferences and quickly became addicted. People called me the CouchDB Chief Evangelist, although I don’t really like the title. From 2008 I started getting contracting jobs specifically for CouchDB and things blew up quickly that it became clear soon, that an organisation of some sort was needed to handle this. I eventually joined forces with CouchDB’s original inventor and J Chris Anderson to form the company Couch.io. We initially weren’t keen on taking venture capital, but when the whole NoSQL thing blew up, it was very hard to say no and on January 1st 2010 we were in business.
Couch.io turned into CouchOne and was eventually merged with Membase into Couchbase. Unfortunately, at this point, there isn’t much Couch-y about Couchbase aside from some underlying technology, so the name can be confusing.
I parted ways with Couchbase a week ago in order to concentrate and focus more on Apache CouchDB and related technologies.
In late 2011 two major supporters of CouchDB withdrew their support: Canonical’s UbuntuOne service, on paper a poster-child use-case for CouchDB and Saucelab’s Selenium platform publicly made clear that they were moving to other technology. It wasn’t a big deal if you looked closely, the one project didn’t have enough resources to integrate with CouchDB the right way and the other diverged so far from the original system design, that CouchDB was no longer a good fit. We were and we remain good friends with the respective developers, so we didn’t feel like pointing that out specifically. The result though was that people who didn’t look closely saw that CouchDB had popular failures where it hadn’t. This wasn’t all bad, but set the stage for another incident a few weeks later.
CouchDB’s original inventor publicly announced that he’d move on from Apache CouchDB to Couchbase fully. That new technology would only go into Couchbase. If you are in the know, this wasn’t a big deal again, he hadn’t contributed to CouchDB in two years, Couchbase was a different thing and he wanted to rally support for that. The casual reader though took away one lesson: “CouchDB is dead”.
With the added confusion of Couchbase’s name, and continuing their CouchConf conferences, things looks dire.
With this in the wild, the active CouchDB committers got together and put out an excellent 1.2.0 release that was accompanied by a new, modern website design. We thought instead of writing counter-statements and start unnecessary he-said-she-said discussions, we’d rather concentrate on shipping good software. 1.2.0 was well received and the whole thing lead the team to come together as a whole in Boston and two weeks later in a smaller group in Dublin in April 2012.
We came up with a long list of of features that we wanted to get into CouchDB. Some work happened over the summer, but I personally took a bit of a break to avoid burn-out from CouchDB. In fall, things started moving faster again when more community members started pushing things along. New contributors came and we finally came up with a way to go forward.
We decided to not be insane. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. While it wasn’t all bad in CouchDB land we could do better and to do better we had to change a few things.
We determined that CouchDB needs a fresh mission statement. I signed up to come up with a few drafts, but nothing happened yet, so this one is still out there cough.
We decided to release more often. With the upcoming 1.3.0 release we will switch to a quarterly release cycle. A new minor version will come out approximately every 90 days, even if it is just a few bug fixes that a small number of people direly need.
CouchDB 1.3.0 will ship with top-notch API documentation right inside of Futon, the built in admin interface.
We will start to set up teams where anyone can sign up to work on a specific thing: docs, our JavaScript components, the Erlang core, the admin interface (built in HTML+JS). We want to make sure anyone who has the right skills can contribute in their area of expertise and not be scared away by the Erlang.
We put some emphasis on QA, automated testing, building binaries and packages for releases as well as in-development versions, so people can try new features before they come out more easily and as a result report issues early.
A few of the core team will put some focus on encouraging contributions rather than coding themselves. We hope to get more people on board with CouchDB development.
We also started doing roughly quarterly in-person meetings (at least as smaller groups) and weekly status meetings on IRC to give everything a little more focus and transparency.
The next few slides show a long list a few features that we’ll be working on. If you think anything is missing, let us know!
The more prominent things are: Merging rcouch, BigCouch, the new Futon, the plugin system and v8/node integration.
rcouch is a cutting edge distribution of CouchDB with many experimental features. A lot of that work is useful for Apache CouchDB and we plan to fold those back into the project.
BigCouch is a industry-strength clustering solution for CouchDB to allow seamless scaling and storing of lots of data. BigCouch is going to be merged into mainline CouchDB as well.
The admin interface Futon is getting a complete refresh with modern web development technologies.
There are many features hidden in some developer’s git repository because, while useful, it wasn’t generally applicable to CouchDB. With the plugin system, we hope that we can fuel a repository of plugins to CouchDB that are easily installed (think browser extensions, right from Futon). For example, you could install GeoCouch with the click of a button.
Finally, we are currently discussing the move from SpiderMonkey and to V8 or even Node. The jury is still out on which one it is going to be, but we hope that this is going to open up a lot more opportunities for CouchDB in terms of features and new contributors.
CouchDB would be nothing without you, the community. People who know little about CouchDB might like it or not, but people who really get to know CouchDB are extremely passionate about it.
CouchDB’s core idea, the promise that data can be anywhere it is needed, to make applications easier, more approachable and effective for people in modern computing environments, that idea is a big one. It’s the one that brings this community together.
Thanks again for coming, you are all awesome. CouchDB means a lot to me and I get a little teary seeing you all here.
If you like any of the above todos, or have some of your own, please help out, get in touch about how.
The CouchDB ecosystem is full of exciting projects that support CouchDB in one way or another.
PouchDB is the newest project on the scene. PouchDB is a pure JavaScript implementation of CouchDB targeted at the browser.
Let me say that again: CouchDB in JavaScript, for the browser.
PouchDB is the oldest idea, but it took the longest to realise because browsers weren’t ready for it. Now is the time though that we can build and ship a CouchDB compatible data store and replication engine that lives entirely in your browser. If you want to build web apps that can seamlessly synchronise data between a laptop, a phone and a server and not treat one as a “master” and the other as “slaves”, PouchDB is your solution.
TouchDB-iOS and -Android are Objective-C and Java implementations of the same idea, but for mobile phone platforms. They natively integrate into your iOS and Android applications and allow synchronisation between themselves, multiple devices, CouchDB’s on the server and even PouchDB in a browser. Again, a milestone in fulfilling the CouchDB vision: data where it is needed, not on some server, far away over a slow and unreliable or even unavailable connection.
This might not be too obvious to people who don’t do Node, but CouchDB is big, if not essential here, too. As any programming language & platform, Node.js comes with a package manager called NPM. As far as package managers go (and I’ve used them all except I think ant) NPM is the one that sucks least, or rather, it is pretty good.
If you are invested in Node.js programming NPM isn’t just a tool you can use, it is essential to the development and deployment workflow of your applications. It is that good.
And here is the kicker: NPM’s (de)-central registry is build on CouchDB. NPM is effectively a CouchApp. The Node elders love CouchDB.
I suggest, and plan to turn this into an opportunity for CouchDB. Say, for example, we need benchmarking tools for CouchDB. The Node folks are great at that. If we were to go and say, “hey, do you want to help make NPM faster? Help us build benchmarking tools, so we can speed up CouchDB for you.” — And that’s just one idea, the potential collaboration is immense. Add to that that we maybe get native Node support inside CouchDB, we can do all sorts of crazy shit like writing core add-ons to CouchDB in JavaScript.
Finally, I’d like to mention Hoodie, a project that Gregor, Alex, I and a few friends have been working on on and of over the past year. It is frontend web app framework that uses Node and CouchDB. We are happy to show that to you on the weekend.
I am going to mention Node.js one more time. Some of you might know The Node Firm, but for those who don’t, think of it as a company made up of the core contributors to Node.js that come together as a collective of professionals to offer services around Node.js that are complementary to the open source project. Things like consulting, technical vetting, training, things that an open source project rarely can do itself.
The key part for me to like The Node Firm (I joined recently) is that, and I repeat, it is complementary to the open source project. It doesn’t try to extract any value from the project, but merely satisfies demand for services that the project can provide. Finally, proceeds are going right back into the community, in the form of conference support, swag, stickers, t-shirts, and so on.
I think this is a brilliant set up for an open source company and I hope many will fork this model.
With that as a preamble, I am happy to announce that together with Dave Cottlehuber and the preliminary support of a few community members, we are launching The Couch Firm, modelled after The Node Firm.
It is early days for us, but expect the same setup, a business complementary to the open source project.
Above all, Open Source is about transparency and community, and I hope you feel you have an accurate picture of where we’re at right now. We had a hard year, lost our traction, and we still came out on top.
With this, I’ll leave the stage for a day of exciting speakers with all sorts of crazy cool topics.
Thank you all for being here!