In this month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting we will be taking a look at Apache CouchDB. I quote from the official site:

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.

CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests.

Get Comfy With CouchDB

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

CouchDB is one of the more mature schema-less map/reduce object dbs out there. In this talk we'll cover the basics of what CouchDB is, and why it's cool, and then we'll run through a sample application. The application will show off LINQ to Couch, basic persistance, views and full-text search with CouchDB-Lucene.

Alex Pedenko has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

Alex is also involved in a number of Open Source projects like Bistro and NDjango, and the .net side of CouchDB via Divan and LoveSeat

Later this month I'll be attending the Mozilla Add-Ons Meetup in Chicago.

I'm continually impressed with the extensibility of Mozilla applications and the amazing things people are doing with it. I'm interested in both the extensibility model and in writing a few custom extensions myself, even if it's just for my own use. Given that it's mostly XML and JavaScript, it should be right up my alley.

After seeing a presentation about building Firefox extensions earlier this year I decided I had to look into that more seriously.

So if you're in the area and wants to see what this is all about, this meetup might be a good way to get some info to get going.

I finally got around to properly record and publish one of those JavaScript presentations that I have been doing at local users groups. The video and the slide deck are available below.

The video

And the slide deck.

If you prefer, you can download the slide deck.

Here are two user group events that are happening soon and that I'm directly involved.

July 8^th, Chicago ALT.NET

0-60 With Fluent NHibernate
See the full description of the session over at the Chicago ALT.NET home page. We will have Hudson Akridge tell us all about Fluent NHibernate, a project that has been instrumental in getting people on NHibernate by simplifying a lot of that ORM's configuration chores.

The Chicago ALT.NET meetings start at 6PM in the Sears Tower. Check the website for complete location details.

July 14^th, WI.NET

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces
I'm taking my little JS presentation to the WI.NET UG in Milwaukee. The group's website hasn't been updated with the presentation details yet but it's basically the same presentation given at other local UGs.

The meeting starts at 7PM. Come ready to be surprised.

This Wednesday, June 17^th, the Chicago .NET Users Group, CNUG, has invited me to bring my JavaScript presentation to their monthly meeting.

Despite of what the event description might lead you to believe, the talk is hardcore JavaScript, not much specific to Ajax at all, although I believe the material will greatly help you with the Ajax work as well.

You can read the complete talk description and register for the event. Hope to see you there.