If you are just getting around to looking at MongoDB – the NoSQL, JavaScript driven, JSON document database – then 10gen’s new MongoDB Web Shell at try.mongodb.org may be of use. It’s a tiny shell designed to help in education for the NoSQL database by offering a subset of the JavaScript and MongoDB API that users would find with a full MongoDB installation. That means you can create data and manipulate it from the comfort of your own browser. There’s also an integrated tutorial which steps through the some basic of JavaScript, creating documents, querying them, updating them and deleting them.
The only rough element I noticed was that clicking in the shell window doesn’t take focus unless you click next to the shell prompt, at least under Chrome that is. So remember that if you find it unresponsive.
For more experienced developers, the shell has a number of interesting elements. The browser shell talks to a background mongodb instance with a Flash based front end. That backend handles sandboxing of the various user sessions connected to it and ensures that the code being entered doesn’t choke the server. 10Gen have released the source to the shell, under an Apache 2.0 licence, on GitHub.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog