This is the second in a series of blog posts introducing the Apache CouchDB 2.0 release. Read part one: The Road to CouchDB 2.0 here. 

CouchDB 2.0 will ship with Fauxton, the new CouchDB web interface. Fauxton is a single–page application to make managing CouchDB 2.0 as easy as possible. Some of Fauxton’s new features allow users to manage document conflicts, create and query Mango indexes, set up a new cluster, and many more (I don’t want to spoil all the fun before you try it). We have also improved the user experience for all the functionality previously supported in Futon.

Fauxton was started by Cloudant. They had the idea of building a very modular dashboard that could be used in Fauxton, and also be used for the Cloudant service. This has worked even better than originally anticipated. Fauxton’s modular design allows anyone to customise the build and select which features they want enabled, so it can be used in PouchDB-server, PouchDB Inspector, AvanceDB, and anywhere else where the CouchDB http protocol is supported. 

Originally we wrote Fauxton in Backbone.js, but we have now transitioned it to React.js and Flux. At this point, there are only a few small components still built in Backbone. Changing to React has been a fantastic move, as we have found it easier to build out new functionality and we have improved the stability of Fauxton by significantly increasing the test coverage at the same time.

We have some exciting plans for Fauxton as we continue to develop it past CouchDB 2.0. There’s a new replication interface (that might land in time for 2.0). We have a new tabular design planned that will unify the look of Fauxton and give a bit more space for some of the more complex interfaces. We will also be doing plenty of internal improvements to the codebase, CSS, and user experience as we go.

If you would like to try out Fauxton, download the latest RC, navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils. Or you can npm install fauxton.

Fauxton wouldn’t have shipped without the amazing contributions of many developers, designers and testers. Thank you for all your hard work.

Garren Smith is the founder of Red Comet Labs and an Apache CouchDB PMC member.

You can download the latest release candidate from http://couchdb.apache.org/release-candidate/2.0/. Files with -RC in their name a special release candidate tags, and the files with the git hash in their name are builds off of every commit to CouchDB master.

We are inviting the community to thoroughly test their applications with CouchDB 2.0 release candidates. See the testing and setup instructions for more details.

This is the first in a series of blog posts introducing the Apache CouchDB 2.0 release.

C.o.u.c.h.D.B. is famously a backronym for “Cluster of unreliable commodity hardware”. However, the 1.x series of CouchDB has been a single-node database system. While it had been designed to be used in a cluster, and while there are clustering strategies and solutions on top of CouchDB 1.x, none are built-in.

In 2008 the startup Cloudant, founded by CouchDB contributor Adam Kocoloski together with his particle physicist colleagues Mike Miller and Alan Hoffman, started building a proprietary layer on top of CouchDB, using the same core technology, Erlang, turning CouchDB into a clustered database.

The Cloudant founders had built custom data storage systems during the tenure as particle physicists working with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider really big data sets (years before “big data” was thing).

Only one year before, in 2007, Amazon had published a paper about “Dynamo” that outlined Amazon’s solution to scale their database layer to their ever growing needs.

Building on the principles on the Dynamo paper, Cloudant’s clustering layer turned CouchDB into a genuine Big Data capable database.

Cloudant’s core business model is a managed database service using the CouchDB clustering technology they have developed. But their key value proposition is the management of that database, not the code itself, so in 2010 Cloudant made their clustering technology available as the open source project BigCouch.

And in summer 2013 they donated the BigCouch project to the Apache Software Foundation to be integrated into Apache CouchDB proper, fulfilling CouchDB’s original promise of supporting clusters of unreliable commodity hardware as Apache CouchDB 2.0.

In the past pretty exactly three years, the two now widely diverging codebases have been unified into one (with a few warts we are aiming to remove for 3.0 and beyond). The three milestones, roughly one per year, were:

1. The Initial “Windsor” Merge: Named after the final of two hacking sessions of CouchDB core contributors and Cloudant employees Robert Newson and Paul Davis to bring the BigCouch source code into the Apache CouchDB repository and `master` branch of development.
2. At the time of the branching off of BigCouch, CouchDB was at version 1.0.1. At the time of the Windsor merge, CouchDB was at version 1.4.0 and several substantial new features hadn’t been added to the codebase yet, so we had to do some catch up.
3. With all the pieces in place, we had to make sure CouchDB 2.0 was a coherent project: Installation, documentation, all tests working, etc. So we spent the last year polishing off the final experience.

With 2.0 in release candidate phase, we already identified the upcoming areas of work and we are not going to delay releases again for this long.

Earlier this year, Cloudant began to upgrade their production clusters to the newly merged 2.0 codebases and on top of that smooth transition, we are now ready to release CouchDB 2.0 after a thorough release candidate process.

You can download the latest release candidate from http://couchdb.apache.org/release-candidate/2.0/. Files with -RC in their name a special release candidate tags, and the files with the git hash in their name are builds off of every commit to CouchDB master.

We are inviting the community to thoroughly test their applications with CouchDB 2.0 release candidates. See the testing and setup instructions for more details.