CouchDB "Won't be a puppet of IBM"
I had a chat with Jan Lehnardt, VP of Apache CouchDB and chair of its Apache Project Management Committee, Noah Slater, another independent PMC memeber, and Bob Newson, a senior engineer at Cloudant and a member of the PMC, and they both insisted CouchDB "won't be a puppet of IBM," even if Cloudant is, for now, the most influential committer. The PMC has 11 people and only 4 of them work for Cloudant while the wider body of committers includes more than 40 people, with less than 50% employed by Cloudant, according to Slater.
One question is how big of a hard-core community CouchDB can build, given that it's developed in Erlang, a language that isn't widely. To be clear, those developing on the database have REST interface options and can interact with the database using JavaScript and other languages, but under-the-hood work on the database itself requires familiarity with the Ericsson-developed programming language.
"Erlang lets people build complex systems with way-smaller teams," Lehnardt said. "I don't need 100 Java developers to build a database, I need 5 people, though we have a lot more than that."
"I couldn't imagine bringing the kind of service and reliability that Cloudant provides using Java," added Newson. "Java doesn't have the separation between processes and the time slicing that the Erlang VM provides. A lot of the really good decisions in Erlang are predicated on delivering services that are highly reliable."
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10/27/2014 | 10:05:07 AM
One question is how big of a hard-core community CouchDB can build, given that it's developed in Erlang, a language that isn't widely. To be clear, those developing on the database have REST interface options and can interact with the database using JavaScript and other languages, but under-the-hood work on the database itself requires familiarity with the Ericsson-developed programming language.
"Erlang lets people build complex systems with way-smaller teams," Lehnardt said. "I don't need 100 Java developers to build a database, I need 5 people, though we have a lot more than that."
"I couldn't imagine bringing the kind of service and reliability that Cloudant provides using Java," added Newson. "Java doesn't have the separation between processes and the time slicing that the Erlang VM provides. A lot of the really good decisions in Erlang are predicated on delivering services that are highly reliable."