I’ve just pushed CouchObject 0.5 out to the rubyforge mirrors, here’s the History.txt file:

== 0.5.0 2007-09-15

* 2 major enhancements:
  * Database.filter{|doc| } for filtering the on doc, in Ruby!
  * couch_ruby_view_requestor, a JsServer client for CouchDb allowing you to query in Ruby

* 1 minor enhancement:
  * Added Database#store(document), the parallel of Document#save(database)

Those two major enhancements are a result of my laziness as reported at the end of the last post, because now you can query your CouchDb views in Ruby instead of Javascript:

$ irb -rubygems
>> require 'couch_object'
=> true
>> db = CouchObject::Database.open "http://localhost:8888/foo" 
=> #<CouchObject::Database:0x142d4d8 ...>
>> pp db.post("_temp_view", "proc{ |doc| return doc if doc[\"foo\"] =~ /qux/  }")
#<CouchObject::Response:0x13f8d50
 @parsed_body=
  {"rows"=>
    [{"_rev"=>189832163,
      "_id"=>"96193CD461168BD024B64EA367C1E0BF",
      "value"=>
       {"_id"=>"96193CD461168BD024B64EA367C1E0BF",
        "_rev"=>189832163,
        "foo"=>"qux"}}],
   "offset"=>0,
   "total_rows"=>1,
   "view"=>"_temp_view:proc{ |doc| return doc if doc[\"foo\"] =~ /qux/  }"},
 @response=#<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>>

Boom. The rows key there is our matching document with an attribute of foo that matches /qux/. You just pass in anything that responds to a #call(the_couch_document) when you define your view request.

But passing around strings will make your eyes sore, so, lets just do this in pure Ruby:

>> pp db.filter{ |doc| return doc if doc["foo"] == "qux" }
[{"_rev"=>189832163,
  "_id"=>"96193CD461168BD024B64EA367C1E0BF",
  "value"=>
   {"_id"=>"96193CD461168BD024B64EA367C1E0BF",
    "_rev"=>189832163,
    "foo"=>"qux"}}]

Thanks to a bit of RubyToRuby we can send along the block to CouchDb just fine. But, how is this all done on the CouchDb side of things? It’s actually a whole lot easier than it looks; all CouchDb does when it receives a view query like the above is pass it on to whatever is defined as the JsServer in $COUCH_INSTALL/couch.ini, this is normally SpiderMonkey, but with the CouchObject gem installed it can be Ruby!

# ...
# You need full, or relative to couch install dir, paths for now
JsServer=/opt/local/bin/couch_ruby_view_requestor
# ...

So have a go at it:

  $ sudo gem install couchobject

Report issues at the tracker, or check out the Git source and have a play with it:

  $ git clone git://repo.or.cz/couchobject.git