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Sopha - A PHP 5.x Interface to CouchDb                                 ver. 0.1
(c) 2008 Shahar Evron, shahar@prematureoptimization.org              2008-07-15
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Important Note
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This version of Sopha is a development version, and is not thuroughly tested. 
It is not recommended to use this version of Sopha in production. You have been
warned!


License
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Sopha is free software distributed under the terms of the New BSD License. 
See LICENSE or http://prematureoptimization.org/sopha/license/new-bsd for 
licensing information. 


System Requirements
-------------------
* Sopha requires PHP 5.2.0 and up in order to run - the latest stable version 
  of PHP 5.2.x is recommended. PHP 5.3.x is likely to work as well.

* While Sopha should work on any system capable of runnign PHP, it is currently
  only tested on Linux and Mac OS X. Users of other operating systems should 
  report any bugs if encountered. 

* Sopha does not require any non-standard PHP extension or INI setting in order
  work. If you encounter any issues, please report it along with the output of
  phpinfo() from your system. 

* You obviously need a CouchDb server installed in order to use Sopha. It 
  doesn't do much except for connecting to CouchDb ;)

Installation
------------
Since Sopha is fully implemented in PHP, there is not much installation needed.

Assuming you downloaded Sopha, simply add the Sopha library/ directory to your
PHP include_path and restart your server (if you use a web server). 

You can also copy the entire library/Sopha directory as is into your include
path (sometimes at /usr/share/php or /usr/include/php). 

Once this is done you simply need to include or require Sopha into your 
scripts, or just use autoload instead. 


Usage
-----
Detailed documentation is not yet available. Read the source code for now :)


Acknowledgements
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Sopha is a mere interface to CouchDb - a phenomenal piece of free software.
Credit goes to the main contibutors of CouchDb - namely Damien Katz, Jan 
Lenhardt, Christopher Lenz and Noah Slater - as well as many others.

The CouchDb project is an Apache Foundation project, and can be found at 
http://couchdb.apache.org/

Some of the code in Sopha, namely the part handling JSON encoding and decoding, 
was adapted from Zend Framework - a high-quality framework for PHP 5.x led by 
Zend Technologies. See http://framework.zend.com for more information about ZF.