Cloudant today announced the immediate availability of a new developer dashboard experience for users of the company’s multi-tenant NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS). With Cloudant Dashboard 2.0, customers experience significant ease-of-use improvements in database development, administration and monitoring. The company is also contributing the software framework for the new dashboard, along with many of the modules that fit into it, to the open-source Apache CouchDB project.

The goal of the new dashboard is to make the Cloudant DBaaS easier to learn and use for software development organizations of all types and sizes. Some of the largest Web and mobile application developers in the world use Cloudant, as the company’s DBaaS is known for distributing data across continents, data centers, and devices to enable massive database scalability and continuous availability. To better complement broader development teams, Cloudant Dashboard 2.0 offers the following features:
● A rich code editor with syntax highlighting
● Fast, iterative development with the ability to preview secondary indexes
● A GUI for replicating data between Cloudant clusters and on-premises databases
● An integrated customer support portal
● The ability to monitor database usage and activity
● A cleaner UI for browsing JSON documents and defining Apache Lucene search indexes

“Using DBaaS already speeds up our time-to-market because we can all stay focused on new development while the experts at Cloudant keep our data layer running and growing,” said Jeff Charette, founder of Menuat. “Working with the new dashboard has been awesome; we especially like the syntax-highlighted view editor and the task management and testing tools, which make working with Cloudant a no-brainer. You have to check it out.”

Quick and Easy Development
The addition of rich code editors and the ability to preview secondary indexes in the new dashboard provide enhanced usability, especially for developers new to NoSQL databases. The new tools prevent mistakes in MapReduce code and JSON formatting errors, allowing developers to write code with Cloudant’s NoSQL DBaaS faster and more easily.

Much like an integrated development environment (IDE), the new code editor offers syntax checking and will reject invalid code. Developers can also preview the results of custom MapReduce functions used to define secondary indexes before fully processing large indexing jobs, preventing time-consuming and costly mistakes.

Point-and-Click Replication
Managing replication jobs and search indexes is now easier than ever. Features that were previously accessed more efficiently through the Cloudant API are now better integrated into the dashboard. Database replication allows Cloudant customers to replicate an entire data set to a new database or synchronize changes with an existing one. In the new dashboard, developers simply pick source and target databases and then click “Replicate.”

Integrated Customer Support
Cloudant Dashboard 2.0 introduces a fully integrated customer support portal. Previously, customers had to email Cloudant’s support team. Now they can create support tickets and review open and closed cases directly through the dashboard.

“It’s our job to make Cloudant as easy as possible, so our customers can build more software, and grow,” said Brad Noble, VP of product design at Cloudant. “This version of the dashboard brings core aspects of Cloudant’s service to the surface, like database replication. I can’t wait to see what our customers do with it.”

CouchDB Community
Cloudant open-sourced some of the new dashboard code into the Apache CouchDB project, where it is now available as an experimental release. CouchDB 1.5 users can access it at localhost:5984/_utils/fauxton/. New dashboard tools now available to the open-source community include data browsing, rich code editors, syntax checking, and database replication.

For a free Cloudant account, go to https://cloudant.com/sign-up and get started.