Simple JavaScript lib for talking to CouchDB REST API

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

The CouchDB REST API is brilliantly simple and very easy to use. Unfortunately, libraries for talking to CouchDB always seem to invent their own API, without any particular advantages, and some serious disadvantages:

1) Knowing the CouchDB REST API doesn't mean you understand how the library works... which is especially annoying if you're talking to CouchDB from multiple languages (like in our case, Python and JavaScript)

2) I've never seen a wrapper that nicely exposed even all the *current* REST API, and the wrappers constantly have to be updated as new CouchDB features are added.

So what I want is something that doesn't reinvent an API, but instead just makes it easy to make REST requests, with some simplifications we can make around the fact that CouchDB is all JSON all the time (except for attachments, so we need two special case methods there).

So I'm proposing we make a JavaScript implementation of the Python version I've been experimenting with here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~microfiber/microfiber/trunk/view/head:/microfiber.py#L257

Akshat is going to write this, and I'm going to walk him through it to help him learn the dmedia guts.