DesktopCouchWishList

Revision 2 as of 2011-04-15 02:59:52

Describe DesktopCouchWishList here.

This is where Jason is keeping notes on changes he would like to see in desktopcouch based on his experience working on dmedia.

Contents

Abstract away the Desktop part
1. abstractcouch.get_env()
2. reconnection hack must go
Per DB sync should be opt-in, not opt-out
Standard location for static webUI files

Abstract away the Desktop part

In addition to using desktopcouch, Both Novacut and dmedia must be able to run on headless servers and talk to a system-wide CouchDB. Although as of dmedia 0.6 this will finally be possible, it took a while to get there, plus there is still one fundamental issue: the desktopcouch reconnection hack for working around CouchDB hanging after resuming from suspend.

abstractcouch.get_env()

There needs to be a single entry point from which an app can get information about the CouchDB environment it is running in. If you were running against desktopcouch, it would return something like this:

{
  "oauth": {
    "consumer_key": "oRTyTHKiKu", 
    "consumer_secret": "bdXSzITryM", 
    "token": "lyrygLlsbk", 
    "token_secret": "QbqvZaiBGV"
  }, 
  "port": 45484, 
  "url": "http://localhost:45484/"
}

Or if you were running against the system-wide CouchDB, it would return something like this:

{
  "port": 5984, 
  "url": "http://localhost:5984/"
}

dmedia.core.get_env() implements the above behavior (but the point is apps shouldn't have to abstract away the desktop part on their own).

When talking to CouchDB from Python, dmedia.abstractcouch.get_server() is used to create an appropriately configured couchdb.Server based on the env it is passed.

When talking to CouchDB from JavaScript (UI running in embedded WebKit), the dmedia CouchView is used to transparently sign OAuth requests. This would be a great piece to standardize and upstream into desktopcouch.

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