the corner office

If you're a Lotus Notes developer or ever were a Lotus Notes developer, then you probably follow Damien Katz's blog, and you smile knowingly when you see the rest of the world trying to get to grips with CouchDB.

I remember reading Damien's first Couch-in-current-form post back in 2005 and thinking 'sounds cool, interesting project he'll be blogging about until he gets another job'. As Volker Weber pointed out, CouchDB has come a long way since then, and it's going places now.

So now, reading Damien's latest post:

Right now I'm exploring some ideas of integrating CouchDB with some Lotus technologies, and perhaps creating some new browser-based applications called CouchApps.

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So I want to know what the Lotus community thinks about CouchDB, do you see a future for Lotus and Apache CouchDB? What do you see it looking like? What sorts of tools, support, applications ,etc would you need to make it something viable?

My first reaction is thinking it's a great idea but too much work to turn into something as all-encompassingly powerful an app platform as Notes can be. I think this because the data store is important and has huge potential, but it's what you build on top of the data store that's really going to count. CouchApps may be nifty, but if you know Notes you know that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Then I remember what I thought back in 2005, and how wrong I was. And now that Damien's eyeing application territory... much like I said yesterday, it'll be quite interesting to come back this post in a few years' time and see what's happened since.

Going back to his post though - I see some interesting words: "integrating", "applications", "support", "viable".

My own suspicion is that the cat is amongst the pigeons a bit in IBM right now. CouchDB has the potential to become the foundation of a 21st century Notes, and people in IBM must know it. Unless there's some faint plan to marry the two (which I can't see), you have to regard CouchDB as a competitor to Notes. IBM is a many-headed beast, and I'm not sure IBM itself quite knows what to do with it, but in many respects, CouchDB is a very disruptive technology.