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:

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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