Hello from Jessica Liu, at Couchbase

[Jessica Liu]

Greetings! This is Jessica Liu, new product manager for the Couchbase Lite team. Excited to be here!

A little bit about myself: before Couchbase, I was contracting the last quarter at MongoLab, a MongoDB-as-a-Service start-up in the city (dramatic music cue: dunh-dunh-dunhhhh), which started my interest in the NoSQL space. But, prior to that I had mostly worked on front-end and mobile technologies, working at companies like Sencha (HTML5 web application frameworks), Adobe (AIR and Flash mobile feature development) and Palm (remember the Treo!).

Looking forward to working with everyone!
- Jessica

[al...@missionvi.com]

Jessica, I know posting to an introduction 13 months later is unusual, but based on your intro, you can probably answer my question quickly, and after several hours of research, I am coming up empty. I am developing cross platform mobile apps using adobe air. I want to use Couchbase lite. I have not been able to find any SDKs, libraries, or any general discussions on how to get Couchbase Lite installed with my app. Do you know if this is even possible, and if so , can you steer me in the right direction? .. thanks
Allen

[Jens Alfke]

On Aug 16, 2014, at 3:42 PM, al...@missionvi.com wrote:

I am developing cross platform mobile apps using adobe air. I want to use Couchbase lite. I have not been able to find any SDKs, libraries, or any general discussions on how to get Couchbase Lite installed with my app.

We don't have any adapters for use with Air, and I haven't heard of anyone's who's integrated Couchbase Lite into an Air app.

The technology is basically Flash, right? So you're coding in a variant of JavaScript, and I assume you can issue HTTP requests fairly easily, so it wouldn't be hard to call CBL's REST API. The main task would be some native glue to start up CBL at launch time. The amount of work sounds pretty comparable to the existing PhoneGap adapter, i.e. very little coding but a nontrivial amount of packaging work.

—Jens

[al...@missionvi.com]

Yeah, thats exactly it. So , I was looking for something like the phone gap adaptor, and have found nothing. You are correct. The http requests are easy so everything but the native glue to start up CBL is exactly what I have been searching for. Thank you for validating that it does not exist, So I can stop tearing my hair out and start thinking about another solution.
The way to go maybe to get a native extension that would do pretty much what the plug in does.

[Jens Alfke]

On Aug 17, 2014, at 3:34 PM, al...@missionvi.com wrote:

The way to go maybe to get a native extension that would do pretty much what the plug in does. 

I don't know if you have experience writing native Air extensions, but if you know how to do it, the amount of code needed to start up Couchbase Lite is pretty minimal. Here's the code for PhoneGap. The important part is just two lines:

    CBLManager* dbmgr = [CBLManager sharedInstance];
    CBLRegisterJSViewCompiler();

After that you just need to get the base internal URL of Couchbase Lite and convey it to your JS ActionScript code.

    self.liteURL = dbmgr.internalURL;

Your app then uses that URL as the base of the REST API, which is 99% compatible with CouchDB's API.

(Actually I just realized that Air may be using its own HTTP client implementation instead of using NSURLConnection. If it does, things are a little bit trickier; instead of using the normal 'fake' HTTP interface, you'll have to have CBL open a real socket, bind it to the loopback interface only, and talk to that. If it comes to that, I can give you more details.)

—Jens