And you are here why?

Damien Katz writes : What's the future of CouchDB? It's Couchbase. Huh? So what about   Apache CouchDB ? Well, that's a great project. I founded it, coded the earliest versions almost completely myself, I've spent a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears on it. I'm very proud of it and the impact it's had. And now I, and the Couchbase team, are mostly moving on. It's not that we think CouchDB isn't awesome. It's that we are creating the successor to it: Couchbase Server. A product and project with similar capabilities and goals, but more faster, more scalable, more customer and developer focused. And definitely not part of Apache. ... If it sounds like I'm saying Apache was a mistake, I'm not. Apache was a big part in the success of CouchDB, without it CouchDB would not have enjoyed the early success it did. But in my opinion it's reached a point where the consensus based approach has limited the competitiveness of the project...

Stephanie Rieger has a plea for Progresive Enhancement here .  Its long, and well worth the read.  But ( But! ), when I read it, all that gets hammered home to me is how this is exactly the same crap that we went through back in the 90s, and how ridiculously painful the whole process was. Everything old is new again.  Mind you, the complexity associated with the solutions has gone up drastically), but it is, stil, the same damn problem.  (Remember, Complexity never goes away, it just moves up the food chain ).  The following is what she did... First, we built the menu to fail gracefully.   In this case, it meant building a menu that was   open by default , and only closed once the page had loaded. If   the JavaScript failed , the menu would simply never close. It might not look terribly graceful, but it would still be fully usable ( to navigate …not to slide open and shut triggering fancy animations… that’s not the menu’s actual job. )...