This weekend—over and above working on our ongoing greenhouse-erection project—I have created a simple explorer for CouchDb servers that for want of a better name I have called Hello.
I don’t have an official web site for this software yet. For now you can download HelloCouchDb-1.0.tgz, comment on the announcement on the CouchDb Google group, or (new!) see my rough notes on Jottit.
What it Does
It does not do all that much: it shows a list of databases. You can select a database and it shows you a list of documents. You can select documents to see their content, pretty-printed in tabular form.
There is a document editor, but it is limited to changing the values of existing fields of your document: you cannot change the type of fields or add new ones. Obviously this is an area I plan to do more work in.
Despite these limitations, it is already a useful GUI to the CouchDb server.
Installation
The application of four files: hello.html, hello.js,
hello.css, and formbg.gif.
It assumes that it is running on the CouchDb server, and that json.js
is available in its parent directory (that is, at relative URI
../json.js). To install it on your server, you unpack the files in to
a directory called hello in the directory containing json.js, then
visit http://localhost:8888/_utils/hello/hello.html.
It is a single-page AJAX application: the lists of databases and documents work by making an HTTP request from the JavaScript code, unpacking the JSON that the server returns, and generating HTML elements on the fly via the DOM. Depending on how slow your server is, you may see ‘Loading …’ and ‘Saving …’ messages flashing up while it waits for the responses.