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I'll soon have to develop a web portal accessing a couchDB. Of course, I have done some research already, however I'm not sure if my ideas will work out.

I will have an existent couchDB. There will probably only be one user available which gets read-access via the GET-method. The web portal will have to filter and display data for different users from that couchDB, so I'll need some kind of extra user-management.

So far I have only basic knowledge about web frameworks and technologies, however I am quite experienced in Java. So from my research so far, I was seriously thinking about using Grails, ExtJS or both. However, will I be able to easily access the couchDB from within those frameworks? I've found some concerning info about necessary patches for ExtJS that are not in active development anymore.

I did have a very brief look at couchApps, however I'm not sure if those are sufficient enough (especially because of the user-management layer, I will only have this one couchDB user for accessing the DB). Also I found Django, however I'm not at all familiar with Python yet. :/

I'd be very thankful if someone could help me out a little in finding a suitable framework.

Thanks so far!

Blacklight
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I would suggest that you go with whatever you know the best. It sounds like you're going to have to ramp up quickly, so learning a whole new language is near impossible. A new framework would be difficult.

Any language that can encode/decode JSON and has good a good HTTP can speak to CouchDB without a problem. If you're most familiar with Java then you're in good hands: Jackson is a very popular JSON library and there are plenty of good HTTP libraries. Ektorp is the most popular Java library for CouchDB.

Or you could skip the entire middle tier. Write a JS application in the browser that makes calls directly to CouchDB. Have your web server provide the access management: only certain users can access pieces of the CouchDB API, limit the HTTP writing verbs, etc. One popular way of doing this is to direct all GETs to CouchDB and direct all PUT/POST/DELETE communication to the business layer.

But like I said, since this sounds like a work project I would do whatever is most comfortable for you.

Cheers.

Sam Bisbee
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  • Ok thanks for your answer and clarifying a bit. I thought there are limitations connecting to a couchDB depending on the framework. But if accessing is that flexible, I guess you are right and I have to evaluate which framework I'm most comfortable with. Since Grails is using Groovy with a Java-like syntax, I guess I could really do that. It's for my thesis actually, so yeah limited time and learning a whole new language is difficult. I'm not that comfortable yet with writing my own JS application, but I'll have a look at that as well! – Blacklight Mar 24 '12 at 15:13
  • I use both grails and extjs - but my database is Oracle. If I were to use a JSON data store I would seriously consider skipping the server side framework as ExtJS now has the MVC architecture and you can write fairly sophisticated reusable logic . – dbrin Mar 26 '12 at 06:03