The Details

The backend is still CouchDB, so we didn’t have to sweat out the mysteries of Ruby 1.9 versus the MySQL adapter. In fact we pulled out ActiveRecord entirely, who says Rails is monolithic?

We are using Thin for the web server, which seems to be working great under 1.9. Mongrel had compilation issues, and we didn’t want to try moving our entire Passenger setup to 1.9.

We use the RedCloth, hpricot, json, and dm-validations gems and none of those gave us any trouble under 1.9.

Michael has been working hard on beefing up our CouchDB interface with DataMapper. With luck we should get a post from him shortly on that topic.

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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

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The code for this site is available to the many-eyes beasts of the Interwebs here:

git://sprocket.slackworks.com/srv/git/blarg.git

It requires merb and friends, as well as an instance of CouchDB to be running somewhere. There are a few reasons I chose merb over Rails (which is what I generally use professionally) to do this:

• It comes with no pre-packaged ORM. I wanted to use CouchDB, so none of the existing ORMs would really work for me. My previous experiences of trying to rip ActiveRecord out of Rails have been frustrating.
• It has more flexible routing than Rails. I realize there are ways to accomplish the things I’m doing here in Rails, but the merb routes seem clearer to me, less hand-wavy. And perhaps most importantly:
• It’s not Rails. I use Rails all day long, and I wanted to see what else is out there.

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