On DZone.com today there's a new post from Gonzalo Ayuso about using a stream wrapper to access CouchDb database directly from PHP (via a call to its local file).

Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I’ve discovered that it’s possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension). It’s pretty straightforward to create the wrapper. Of course it’s only an approach. We can create more functionality to our stram wrapper but at least this example meets my needs.

His wrapper uses a client from his Nov framework to open the stream to the given path and gives read and write methods to work with the data inside the database. Code for the wrapper class is included as well as a bit of example code showing how it can be used with the custom stream protocol. You can find the complete code here.