question about moving from railwayjs to towerjs, need to use couchdb.

[rasmuss...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I have an application I was working on part time built on top of Railway.js, then I shelved it, now I am starting up again and since my Railway.js is out of date and I would need to move to the new version anyway I am not sure if I don't want to just move to Tower (basically the client handles most of the important logic, although I am starting to put things in that need to be in the server)

So I am wondering if there are any examples of moving around, I guess the hope is that given that most of my server logic is straightforward and simple I can just copy some code over and change some method calls etc. Probably that isn't realistic though (I just ask because I don't really have a lot of time to work on this project so I need to cut corners wherever I can just to get something reasonable for demo purposes out)


The second thing is that I am using couchdb to store everything and I don't want to go through moving to MongoDB at the moment (although it is a possibility for the future) so I would like to see some examples of using couchdb with Tower.

Thanks,
Bryan Rasmussen

[edubkendo]

Hi Bryan, This isn't any sort of "official" answer, but since this google group is basically unused, I figured I'd answer it so you weren't just left hanging. 

First of all, Lance(viatropos), Tower's primary devloper, doesn't like Google groups, so basically the best place to ask a question, elicit discussion, etc is in the github issues.  Despite what it says here at the top, this google group has been so dead that literally ALL discussion about tower takes place on github.

Second, the current version of Tower is essentially deprecated. People are running into all sorts of challenges trying to get it to install, etc. That's because for several months now, viatropos and TheHydroImpulse have been working exclusively on completely rewriting tower from the ground up. The 0.5 release will basically be a brand new framework. It's being written in javascript, and from everything I've seen has moved well away from the rails inspired API that the early versions of Tower set out to emulate. 

Third, as far as I know (and I'm probably the closest thing to an expert there is, with the exception of a handful of other people), in the current, broken version of Tower, there is basically no way to use anything besides mongoDB, without going into the framework code itself. It would certainly be possible to add a couchDB backend to this version of Tower, As you can see here, there is actually a stub for couchDB here: https://github.com/viatropos/tower/tree/master/packages/tower-store/server . The new version, 0.5, should make it much easier to support additional databases. I have already seen some code for cassandra, so if couchDB isn't supported at launch, it wouldn't be much work to add if you wanted.

So, my advise to you, such as it is, is to follow viatropos on github, so you can keep an eye on what he's doing there, and watch for tower 0.5. If you were interested in contributing, to try and get it done even sooner and perhaps have something helpful to do while waiting, you could certainly contact viatropos. This may not be what you wanted to hear, and you may even decide that the new version of Tower isn't what you are interested in, but it is definitely for the best. The original Tower codebase was trying to bring together to many disparate dependencies, and besides making it a genuine pain in the butt to keep things up to date with all those dependencies, had become extremely messy with cruft and glue code. The new, far more modular approach, is much cleaner and far more maintainable.

Anyways, this may have been more info than you asked for, but I hope I answered your question. Hopefully anyone else landing here will see it too.

-- edub