Talking to CouchDB via F# and Symbiote

One of the cooler technologies that I have playing with lately is CouchDB.

"Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution" (http://couchdb.apache.org/).  

Alex Robson recently announced a set of libraries that, among other things, makes talking with CouchDB from a .NET language very easy. Here's an F# example (the complete source can be found at http://github.com/dmohl/Symbiote--Relax--Example):

module Progam

open System
open Symbiote.Core
open Symbiote.Relax
open Symbiote.Daemon

type PersonCouchDocument =
    val id : string
    val mutable name : string
    val mutable address : string
    inherit DefaultCouchDocument 
        new (id, name, address) = 
            {id = id; name = name; address = address} then base.DocumentId <- id
        member x.Name
            with get () = x.name
        member x.Address
            with get () = x.address

type DemoService = 
    val couchServer : ICouchServer
    new(couchServer) = {couchServer = couchServer}
    interface IDaemon with
        member x.Start () =
            do Console.WriteLine("The service has started")
            let document = new PersonCouchDocument("123456", "John Doe", "123 Main")
            x.couchServer.Repository.Save(document)
            let documentRetrieved = 
                x.couchServer.Repository.Get<PersonCouchDocument>(document.DocumentId);
            do Console.WriteLine(
                "The document with name {0} and address {1} was retrieved successfully", 
                documentRetrieved.Name, documentRetrieved.Address)
            do x.couchServer.DeleteDatabase<PersonCouchDocument>()
        member x.Stop () =
            do Console.WriteLine("The service has stopped")

do Assimilate
    .Core()
    .Daemon(fun x -> (x.Name("FSharpDemoService")
                                    .DisplayName("An FSharp Demo Service")
                                    .Description("An FSharp Demo Service")
                                    .Arguments([||]) |> ignore))
    .Relax(fun x -> x.Server("localhost") |> ignore) 
    .RunDaemon() 

As you can see, interacting with CouchDB via F# and Symbiote is a snap.  Symbiote has a large number of additional features and advantages. To learn more about it, go to http://sharplearningcurve.com/wiki/Symbiote-Main.ashx.