I'm using CouchDB as event log and I want to build simple UI on top of it so I could query the event more easily.
I can either use raw HTTP calls and build the views manually or I can use CouchApp framework.
The problem is it looks like those frameworks are not been actively maintained.
Are there other possibilities today?
Have you looked at Erica? It's an Erlang successor to couchapp (Python) with nicer features that help a lot in developing and deploying CouchApps.
The apparent lack of activity may also denote that these tools simply work. Couchapp is technically deprecated in favour of Erica, but it works well.
Also note, that there are many ways for designing CouchApps. Erica and couchapp both implement a "filesystem in the design doc" method where the design document holds attachments that are accessible as regular directories and files. In this case the key is the filename and the value the file's content.
Kanso, for example, processes an app.json file with a description of your app's content. Think: Makefile for CouchApps.
These differences may also affect on your choice.
Couch Apps are cool, but you definitely need a tool to create and deploy them. I use the term "couchapp" to refer to any app that is served directly from CouchDB, but the name is definitely overloaded...
The first tool for deploying apps to couchdb was also named "couchapp" ( slightly confusing? ). It was written in Python, and it used a lot of folders and sub-folders with many separate files to represent your final _ddoc. It has been replaced now by "erica".
Another option, that runs in Node.js instead of Python, is "node.couchapp.js". This one does not use a directory structure to represent the ddoc structure, but allows you to compose your ddoc like an object, using javascript. It installs an executable named....(ready?)...."couchapp".
Finally, "Kanso" or "kan.so", which is not just a push-tool, but seems to be a serious attempt to take it to the next level. This is the only one that I would call a "framework".
It brings a package-management system -- you can easily download and plug-in third-party Kanso Packages (and their dependencies) to extend functionality. The module system can bundle many javascript modules into one file for serving to the browser. Probably lots of other stuff too -- I have only begun to look into it, but it seems like this might be the best way to go, right now, for building non-trivial couchapps.
Update, 2014
Cloudant may be the most stable source of info these days. The couchapp.org site is adrift, but the project is still active in various guises.
There is also hood.ie which is in alpha, a sort of evolution of the idea, not unlike Meteor.js.
Kanso still won't sit on Windows.
Here's the Cloudant list
• CouchApp.py
• Erica
• Soca
• node.couchapp.js
• Reupholster
• Kanso
• Situp
• Mouch
Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/fiatjaf/reactive-couch
In this I describe (and give you a template ready to be used and adapted) a system for creating server-and-client-rendered CouchApps based on CouchDB's list and show functions and Facebook's React.js. It's a good system, component based, very maintainable, and also crawlable.
it is not a framework (something that would please some)(also, all the cited options are not frameworks), just a system that uses established tools like React, curl.js and Erica.
Soca works very well, been using it for over a year and have been really happy with it .
As for the frontend layer , I use backbone and the backbone.couchdb adapter for managing the data and listening to the changes feed for updating data
https://github.com/quirkey/soca https://github.com/pyronicide/backbone.couchdb.js
As for a quick note concerning soca, I've had issues running it with ruby 1.9.3, but REE(1.8.x) still works perfectly
