see discussion too Today, I decided to Google the term "document oriented". Turns out it's not new, here's an article I found Towards truly document oriented Web services on the O'Reilly site. The article gives and example of a REST API that is similar to the one I will be exposing with CouchDb. Cool. "Document Oriented Development" I think this may be a poorly served yet hugely important area of application development. Particularly in storage and management. For document storage, you pretty much have two options in mainstream development, direct file system access and relational databases. Traditional file based systems are simple enough, this is how most PC applications have dealt with documents for a long time. MS Office is a prime example: all documents are files. And relational databases? There is nothing "relational" about documents. XML databases will simplify development only if your data is already XML. Lotus Notes got so much of this right over 15 years ago