CouchOne is the new name for Couchio

The commercial company behind the Apache CouchDB project, Couchio, are changing their name to CouchOne. CouchDB creator and CEO of the company Damian Katz told The H that "It turns out our current name is not what you call good. Nobody knows how to punctuate or pronounce it and the top-level domain is really bad for search engines". The name change is another part of the company's refocussing of CouchDB on mobile devices and offering a mobile development kit for CouchDB.

"The other NoSQL databases that are out that are are pretty much all about scaling up and back end services and CouchDB is no exception to that" says Katz adding "But it is an exception when it comes to how well it scales down". CouchDB is useful in mobile devices because it can scale down but still offer background synchronisation with other CouchDB servers running in the cloud.

CouchDB is already available on Android and a compatible database is available for WebOS; asked about the possibility of an iOS version for the iPhone, Katz revealed that his company is actively developing an iPhone edition. "We are looking for the exception that allows CouchDB to be integrated with iOS," said Katz, noting that Erlang, the language CouchDB is written in is "telecom-grade with low resource utilitisation and is really designed for building back end services not user interfaces".

These differences, Katz hopes, will be enough to see CouchDB get an exception to Apple's iPhone App Store rules. CouchOne is already working with Apple on internal projeces and whatever happens, says Katz, CouchOne is committed to targeting the iPhone. This includes being prepared to write a pure Objective-C version if required. More details are expected to be give today, the first day of CouchCamp in the US.

(djwm)