Anyone Interested in CouchDB as a Service?
I've been working with CouchDB for a few years now and I know there's some interest in learning more about it.
Right now you can dabble with CouchBase and Cloudant, but they're not the same as CouchDB and there's a pretty steep learning curve to get going with them.
Installing and Configuring CouchDB is kind of a pain too, especially if you just want to dabble with it to see how it works.
If I made it really easy to set up a CouchDB user database (not a CouchDB Server, but a database for you on it) would anyone here be interested in that?
As an end user developer all you'd have to do is put the URL to the CouchDB server in your PouchDB.js config file and you're off to the races. The only other requirement on the your end would be that you host your app code on a secure (SSL) web server.
I can provide complete working example code for user auth, CRUD, Live Sync, and other common routines to help get you started. I have some complete apps I can provide code for.
You'll even be able to access CouchDB's "Fauxton Database Manager" and can create "Design Documents" for your database. So it's really a pretty easy and feature rich way to get started with CouchDB.
I installed CouchDB and didn't think it was particularly difficult, so I would challenge your key assumption.
Designing the map/reduce functions is a black art, but I don't know if you can offer a generic service for that.
CouchDB is easy to install on your local machine but not so much setting up a web server.
It's not that's it's "difficult", it's time consuming because to do it right you need to learn how to install, configure, and admin CouchDB.
But you don't need to know or do any of that to use CouchDB with a web app. For that all you really need is "PouchDB.js" or whatever other tool or language you want.
I've gotten almost nowhere with map/reduce functions. I've not spent much time with them though because PouchDB has some plugins that make finding documents easy and fast.
I'm not interested but these are my two cents.
I've been working with couch two years ago for a server plus mobile app. It didn't seem so difficult to me to install it.
That said, i think there exists different types of potential customers that however may not pay for such a service:
User group 1 won't pay obviously, user group 2 may, but probably is a tech people group so they may have their infrastructure and consider hosting it themselves. Anyhow you are "niching" down so that may be a good opportunity
Thanks for the feedback!
I'm thinking more along the lines of someone who just wants to explore using CouchDB without going through the process of installing, configuring, and administrating CouchDB. That's not necessarily "difficult" but it is necessarily time consuming.
But "using" CouchDB is an entirely different thing than administrating it.
App developers can use PouchDB.js in their app code and won't even have to think about CouchDB. It will "just work".
PouchDB is pretty easy to use. Have you worked with it?
https://pouchdb.com
I evaluated working with it but in the end i went for couchbase lite on the mobile side. It was a good product and syncing with versioning was really cool, but in that project i missed the flexibility of querying a sql db.
" i missed the flexibility of querying a sql db."
I've heard this frustration often over the years from developers who come from SQL. I get that. CouchDB does things almost completely different.
But... CouchDB 2.x included "Mango Queries" and PouchDB provides an easy to use plugin for that.
https://pouchdb.com/guides/mango-queries.html
And that's a good example of what I'm thinking "CouchDB as a Service" would be perfect for.
If you could get a single user CouchDB backend in about a minute for, say $5.95 a month, and only pay for a month, wouldn't it be worth it to you to be able to play with those kinds of things?
What if I provided an easy way to populate your DB with sample data, and a library of example code with small, focused, demo apps to work with?
Honestly i don't think i'll use CouchDB anymore so i don't think i'm your target customer and suggestions coming from me may have no significance.
I only find it useful if i have problems with syncing content with multiple mobile devices and i if i need something more flexible than firebase.
That said i don't need a couchdb-playground to evaluate it, buttry ask some other developer since i may not be the correct target.