Tim Kofol took my ideas and ran with them, creating an ingenious way to maintain CouchDB views right in the Ruby code. Witness:

class Post < Blarg::CouchBase 
  couch_accessor :tags
  
  couch_view :comments_view, %[
    function(doc) {
      if (doc.type == "Comment") {
        map(doc.post_id, doc);
      }
    }
  ]
  
  couch_view :all_tags_view, %[
    function(doc) {
      if (doc.type == 'Post') {
        map(null, doc.tags);
      }
    }
  ]

  def self.all_tags   
    self.all_tags_view.flatten.uniq.sort
  end
  
  def comments
    comments = self.class.comments_view(:key => self.document_id)
    comments.sort{|a,b| a.created_at <=> b.created_at}
  end

end

With the views relevant to this class defined in the class itself, we need to load them into CouchDB. I added Rake task which finds all views defined in the project and loads them into CouchDB, creating them or replacing older versions.

rake db:views:load

It’s conceptually a little bit like doing rake db:migrate with ActiveRecord.

Unfortunately CouchDB so far only provides the “map” part of MapReduce, so I still need Post.all_tags and Post#comments to take care of the “reduce” part. When full MapReduce functionality is ready in CouchDB, it will be great to define all the logic in the views and be able to dispense with the silly little helper methods.

One thing that bugs me is that views themselves are just Javascript strings. CouchObject itself has a plugin for CouchDB allowing it to use Ruby as a query language, but I didn’t have any luck getting it to work. It would be pretty fantastic to be able to define views like regular Ruby methods (with some syntactic sugar) and load them up with this interface.

Even better would be a generic query interface, maybe something like Squirrel that could be parsed into a CouchDB view. An exciting possibility of this approach is that you could parse the same query code to talk to other Document Oriented Databases, such as ThruDB SimpleDB or RDDB .