Welcome to the Apache CouchDB weekly news! From today on, we’ll bring you the highlights of what happened in the CouchDB Universe each thursday.

Major Discussions

BigCouch vs. Couchbase

A comparison between the two, around conflict solving, revision docs, nodes, replicas and hashing. Find the thread here.

Healthcare projects running on CouchDB

Albin Stigö asked for healthcare companies / projects using CouchDB. In the thread, a collection of examples and reasons why this is a good fit was discussed. CouchDB works well in healthcare due to its relative ease of configuration and deployment, easy synchronization, backups, attachment-handling and notifications and mobile-readiness. Some examples of projects / companies using CouchDB: CommCare HQ, Mobius, Neurofoundation. Find his summary and the entire thread here.

Weekly CouchDB meeting – summary

• 1.6.rc-2: discussion around blocker; will be collated and sent to the mailing list
• Marketing: there’ll be a weekly CouchDB news (which you are currently reading)
• Fauxton – status: Futon will be removed as soon as Fauxton-implementation is done; following release will be marked as beta
• Merges: discussion around BigCouch and rcouch merges will also be collated and sent to the mailing list

CouchDB Universe

• node-couchdb-model – a simple CouchDB abstraction for NodeJS built on nano
• On recent npm downtime and npm did to make things better: “New Powerful Machines”
• npm’s search got better
• CouchDB-tools: a library of handy functions for use when working with CouchDB documents.
• PouchDB’s replication just got a whole lot faster
• econfig version 0.4.2, a simple EErlang config handler using INI files, has been released
• cloudant 0.5.8 – an effortless Cloudant / CouchDB interface for Python
• Couchbase Lite 1.0 beta 3, a CouchDB-compatible embedded mobile database

Opinions

• On CouchDB as event store
• CouchDB progresses as IBM acquires Cloudant
• 10 common misconceptions about Apache CouchDB
• A presentation on the state of PouchDB

… and also in the news

• “Relying on laws to keep your private information safe is like relying on a dog to guard a plate of bacon.” – Stop Thinking the Government Can Fix Privacy
• “Why your previous developer was terrible; and why your current one seems so amazing”

Posted on behalf of Lena Reinhard.

Jan Lehnardt sent a link to the CouchDB marketing@couchdb.apache.org mailing list where Ari Najarian used CouchDB in a five part course to teach beginners how to program. It’s a great read and I invite you to visit the page.

I would like to slice out one quote from the article where Ari described the CouchDB community:

“The personalities and voices in the CouchDB community are, hands down, the most helpful, generous, welcoming, insightful, ethical, principled, future-minded group of developers I’ve ever encountered in one place. As far as online communities go, you can’t find a safer, more encouraging group of advocates. These people are role models that will help beginners to understand what “open-source” can really be about: social justice, diversity, inclusion, and collaboration.”

This is the reason why I became a part of the Apache CouchDB project – because the community is so awesome.