We have been working away on Steelmesh now for 6 months and it has been a really interesting time. There has been a lot learnt about both CouchDB and NodeJS over the time. While we are still working on ironing a few things out for an official 1.0 release (bug fixes, docs, etc), we have had some thoughts about where Steelmesh will go in the future.
In it’s current form, Steelmesh is designed to take a NodeJS application (with a specific file structure) and replicate that application across a network of machines using CouchDB’s excellent replication. This has proven to work exceptionally well and application deployments in a Steelmesh environment are definitely orders of magnitude easier that what you would experience through manually updating multiple servers.
While I might be wrong, I think using CouchDB for package distribution has greater potential in the long run than the currently very popular method of git based deployment. The current implementation of NPM is a great example of how CouchDB can be used for application distribution to great effect.
What we want to do for Steelmesh 2.0 is enable application distribution for languages over CouchDB using the same general principles as we did for Node in Steelmesh 1.0. This is obviously going to be a little bit of work, and we are only in the planning stages now, but it would be great to get feedback and comment around this if you have any ideas.