I’ll have more notes about CouchDB later tonight.

First, though, I want to step back and look at the big picture.

A few months ago, Bill de hÓra wrote that “a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web” (as opposed to old-school tools that try to pretend the Web doesn’t exist – I’m looking at you, ASP). It doesn’t sound like much, but to me this is the best possible compliment Django could be given. We’ve tried incredibly hard to make sure that Django respects and follows the general principles of the Web.

I’m playing with CouchDB tonight. Some first thoughts, as they occur to me:

• The build process was very easy. I already had Erlang and all the standard automake/autoconf crap installed, so it was just a matter of installing something called icu and going from there. Something like 10 minutes from svn checkout to relaxing.

• Anything I can poke at with curl is pretty damn cool.

• Wow, I can just chuck arbitrary JSON objects up at this thing and it’ll store it. No setup, no schemas, no nothing. This is relaxing…