CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 8. Show Functions

CouchDB’s JSON documents are great for programmatic access in most environments. Almost all languages have HTTP and JSON libraries, and in the unlikely event that yours doesn’t, writing them is fairly simple. However, there is one important use case that JSON documents don’t cover: building plain old HTML web pages. Browsers are powerful, and it’s exciting that we can build Ajax applications using only CouchDB’s JSON and HTTP APIs, but this approach is not appropriate for most public-facing websites.

HTML is the lingua franca of the web, for good reasons. By rendering our JSON documents into HTML pages, we make them available and accessible for a wider variety of uses. With the pure Ajax approach, visually impaired visitors to our blog stand a chance of not seeing any useful content at all, as popular screen-reading browsers have a hard time making sense of pages when the content is changed on the fly via JavaScript. Another important concern for authors is that their writing be indexed by search engines. Maintaining a high-quality blog doesn’t do much good if readers can’t find it via a web search. Most search engines do not execute JavaScript found within a page, so to them an Ajax blog looks devoid of content. We also mustn’t forget that HTML is likely more friendly as an archive format in the long term than the platform-specific JavaScript and JSON approach we used in previous chapters. Also, by serving plain HTML, we make our site snappier, as the browser ...