It has been a bit too long since my last post so I wanted to give you an short update on what I have been up to lately. Last year I built a web service using Amazon SimpleDB, which got me interested in document based databases. Since then I have been reading and following the progress of different open source document based databases, such as CouchDB and MongoDB.
During the time, I have been thinking about what other kind of projects a document based database would be suitable for. Because my lack of imagination (or just because I was too eager to get started:)), i decided to build a simple Web CMS system using PHP and CoachDB. Pages in a CMS system are perfect for storing as documents in a document database, so it seemed like a good choice.
Building the CMS backend actually turned out to be what took the shortest time. I wanted to create a nice looking Javascript based GUI for the editors and administrators, and decided to build it using the javascript library ExtJS. I had never worked with ExtJS before (and I am more of a backend guy than a javascript frontend guy), so it took me some time to get my mind around it, but the result is sweet – ExtJS is really powerful.
The CMS is far from complete, but so far it has given me quite a few ideas for new blog posts, so stay tuned for the upcoming posts on CoachDB and ExtJS!