ActiveCouch wants to be a simple, convenient, idiomatic Object Relational Mapper for the hot new kid on the block - 
CouchDB. CouchDB (simplistically speaking) is a document store, which essentially means that objects can be stored in a 
schema-less environment.

What it is?
-----------
With ActiveCouch, you can easily save, query, delete documents to/from a CouchDB database in your favourite language - 
Ruby. ActiveCouch derives a lot of its principles (and some code) from both ActiveRecord and ActiveResource, two 
libraries made popular by the other hot pubescent on the block - Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org).

Why?
----
As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. And as they also say, death before inconvenience. Our company, Bezurk 
(http://www.bezurk.com) is experimenting with CouchDB as we have a need for a document-model to store vast amounts of 
information, and we needed a convenience mapper in our favourite language, in order to use CouchDB elegantly. Since, the 
Rubyists here at Bezurk are already very familiar with ActiveRecord semantics, care has been taken to ensure that 
ActiveCouch resembled it in many ways.

Requirements
------------
 - Ruby 1.8.5 or above (http://www.ruby-lang.org)
 - rubygems 0.9.4 (http://rubygems.org)
 - JSON gem (http://json.rubyforge.org) [Used for JSON encoding/decoding]
 - RSpec gem (http://rspec.rubyforge.org) [Used to run specs]
 - CouchDB 0.7.2 (http://couchdb.googlecode.com) [Some specs require running CouchDB at localhost:5984]

We would also recommend installing ZenTest (http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/ZenTest/) which provides a very 
convenient way to run specs.

Show me the docs
----------------
We have some pretty basic RDoc bundled along with the source code. But the best source of documentation and sample code 
at this point will be the specs. The layout for specs has been inspired from the very inspiring Rubinius project 
(http://rubini.us) where each class has its own directory, and each method has its own spec file, thus making it very 
readable.


Bugs/Issues
-----------
If and when you find bugs/feature requests, please raise a ticket at http://activecouch.googlecode.com . If we find that 
feature requests are crucial for our internal use, we will definitely integrate it into our project as soon as possible. 
But otherwise, we unfortunately cannot guarantee any deadlines on integration of feature requests. 
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/243810133/]

So, if you find bugs/feature requests, we'd greatly appreciate patches (which include specs), but otherwise please bear 
with us.


Looking Forward
---------------

Obviously, we are very excited about developments in CouchDB land and we will be closely monitoring the CouchDB project, 
in order to further improve ActiveCouch. Since we are using ActiveCouch internally, we are expecting heavy development 
in CouchDB in the months to come.

"The Journey is the Reward"