Beyond a standard web application development environment, including a development machine/OS and a web application server, you will need the following components for your development environment:
Couchbase Server: installed on a virtual or physical machine separate from the machine containing your web application server. Download the appropriate version for your environment here: Couchbase Server Downloads
Couchbase SDK: installed for runtime on the machine containing your web application server. You will also need to make the SDK's available in your development environment in order to compile/interpret your client-side code. The SDKs are programming-language and platform-specific. You will use your SDK to communicate with the Couchbase Server from your web application. Downloads for your chosen SDK are here: Couchbase SDK Downloads
Couchbase Admin Console: administering your Couchbase Server is done via the Couchbase Admin Console, a web application viewable in most modern browsers. Your development environment should therefore have the latest version of Mozilla Firefox 3.6+, Apple Safari 5+, Google Chrome 11, or Internet Explorer 8, or higher. You should set your browser preference to be JavaScript enabled.
The following are supported platforms for the majority of Couchbase Client SDK's:
CentOS 5.5 (Red Hat and Fedora compatible), 32- and 64- bit
Ubuntu 10.04 (Red Hat and Fedora compatible), 32- and 64- bit
Microsoft Windows, for the case of .NET, Java and Ruby SDKs
The following virtual machines are supported:
Java VM
Microsoft .NET VM
The following are development languages supported by the Couchbase Client SDK Libraries:
Java
.NET
PHP
Ruby
C
The TCP/IP port allocation on Windows by default includes a restricted number of ports available for client communication. For more information on this issue, including information on how to adjust the configuration and increase the available ports, see MSDN: Avoiding TCP/IP Port Exhaustion.
Depending upon the OS for your development platform and web application server platform, choose the 32- or 64- bit versions of the SDK. Download and install the following three packages which contain the SDK's:
64- or 32- bit, OS-specific package.
64- or 32- Library Headers.
64- or 32- Debug Symbols.
The .NET and Java SDKs provide their own packages which contain all the libraries required. Please refer to the individual SDK documentation for these two languages for more information on installation.
Beyond installation of these three core packages for any given language or framework, language/framework specific installation information and system prerequisites can be found in each respective SDK guide, e.g. Java SDK Guides. Notably, the scripting languages SDKs, such as those for Ruby and PHP, will also require installation of Couchbase SDKs for C.