Getting Acquainted with CouchRest
Jeff, the guy recommending CouchDB as a document database for our app, suggested that I look at CouchRest as a nice ruby client for CouchDB. And the docs look impressive - so far as they go. It's pretty easy to open up and use a database:
require 'couchrest' @db = CouchRest.database('http://localhost:5984/megafun')
and then saving a document is pretty easy as well:
@db.save_doc({ one: 1, two: 2 })
even doing a bulk store of multiple documents is easy:
@db.bulk_save([{ one: 1, two: 2 }, { one: 1, three: 3 }, { one: 1, four: 4 }])
But the main docs don't really say anything about using a proxy, and in The Shop, with lots of hosts in Amazon's EC2, there's a lot of proxy work that we have to do.
Specifically, to get to Amazon's East datacenter, we have to use a re-directing proxy on our laptops and there was just nothing in the docs about using a proxy, so I had to dig into the code for CouchRest, and thankfully, I've learned a bit of ruby in the last few weeks, and the support was already there!
Because we have servers in EC2 east, I couldn't hard code the proxy usage, but using the pattern we have used for other proxy-based access, I was able to very quickly set up the config files for the CouchDB databases, and then in the code say:
class Database def self.database CouchRest.proxy(AppConfig.database.proxy_uri) if AppConfig.database.use_proxy? @db ||= CouchRest.database(AppConfig.database.uri) end end
and then in the rest of the Database class I could just reference this database method.
The things I'm doing have a lot more to do with how we want to organize the data, and not the logistics of the CouchDB itself. We'll have to come up with some standards on the document format to enable the selection, aggregation, etc. that we're going to need in this project. Not a bad start, and it's looking pretty good right now.
I just need Jeff to get the server spun up on one of our EC2 boxes.