Chris Anderson: CouchDB: Relaxing Offline JavaScript

Last week I hosted Chris Anderson for a Google tech talk on CouchDB as part of the Web E^xponents speaker series. Chris is an Apache CouchDB committer. He is co-author of the forthcoming O'Reilly book CouchDB: The Definitive Guide and a director of couch.io.

Making web applications work offline is a hot topic. Google Gears blazed the trail, and Web Storage is part of HTML5. CouchDB is a NoSQL alternative that makes it easy for web apps to run offline. This is important because even as bandwidth grows, latency is still an issue for a significant number of users, and outages or zero-bars can and do happen. CouchDB makes this a non-issue by running your application close to the user, on their device or in their browser. Chris calls this "ground computing" - a refreshing counterpoint to the oft-used "cloud computing" label. Hear more from Chris in his video and slides.



Check out other videos in the Web Exponents speaker series:

• John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance
• Doug Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts
• Steve Souders: Life's Too Short, Write Fast Code (part 2)
• Rob Campbell: Debugging and Testing the Web with Firebug
  
• Nicholas C. Zakas: Speed Up Your JavaScript
  
• PPK: The Open Web Goes Mobile
• Aza Raskin: Conversational Computing (Ubiquity & Jetpack)
  

By Steve Souders, Performance Evangelist