Unfortunately you can only create a view from the
original data, there is no way to create views whose
input is other views. This means that you cannot do
anything really interesting with values from multiple
documents. You can aggregate data from several documents
using the reduce functionality into buckets, but you
can't process that data further.
I've come to this idea also - when we do get it the world changes. New era for hackers. We will be able to operate against a couchdb cloud from a console-in-a-browser with the power of (and as a full alternative to) a unix system, and to think in terms of that cloud rather than in terms of services. The barrier between code and data will be much more blurred in practical terms because the cloud will host the services.
Over the last few days I've polished up my
notion that CouchDB can be a perfectly viable
application host, all on its own, without any
3rd tier between database and client. That
is, CouchDB is capable of serving standalone
applications. These standalone CouchDB
applications can be deployed to any working
CouchDB node and used from any browser.
I wish couch was based on IO rather than javascript, because with IO you can reverse algorithms out of running code. Hence processes could act as datasources if the VM was like IO. See http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html
Another idea that couchdb already does that is a necessary pre-requisite to this outcome (from http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/standalone_ap...):
I wish couch was based on IO rather than javascript, because with IO you can reverse algorithms out of running code. Hence processes could act as datasources if the VM was like IO. See http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html