Everyone’s written a JavaScript loop that just loops over all the {LIs, links, divs} on a page*, and it’s pretty standard. Something like

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li"); for (var i=0; i<lis.length; i++) { // yes this could be more efficient, don't care // do something here to lis[i] };

or, if you’re using jQuery:

$("li").each(function() { // do something here to this });

The obvious idea that pops into everyone’s head, including mine, when talking about having a running CouchDB that’s specific to me is: why use TCP for it? Why not just use a unix domain socket? Then you don’t have to worry about other people on the same machine trying to access it. Everyone thinks this, and on balance it’s not the way to go. This is why.

One of the things I’m looking at is using CouchDB to store data for applications on your desktop as part of the desktop data/settings idea that Rodrigo’s already written about. Obviously one of the great things here is that applications can collaborate on data stored in there; obviously one of the pre-requisites for collaboration is that everyone’s speaking the same language! So various people working on a number of different mail clients for the Linux desktop and so on are working out what the schema for contact records in CouchDB should look like.

Being able to browse around your database with a web browser is dead handy for writing this sort of thing, I have to say :-)

At the moment, this is the sort of direction we’re heading in. A CouchDB document is JSON, and an example contact looks like this: