TL;DR

What are the prospects of write applications which are completely based on a REST database server (CouchDB) and web applications which directly access the DB instead of having a web server in between?

I recently started looking up some NoSQL databases. MongoDB seems to be a popular choices. I also liked the project.

But I personally liked the REST interface of CouchDB. So what I wanted to know is if there was the possibility of applications (maybe cached apps in web browser, a chrome extension etc.) which could just just query the database directly with no requirement of a webserver in between. All the computational logic would reside in the client application and the database will do what it does, CRUD. Since mostly (I don't know which doesn't) client frameworks support REST quaries, it could be a good way writing applications well optimized for respective framework. These applications though won't be doing complicated computation, but still provide enough functionality which could replace lots of conventional applications.

Are existing resources and projects which would help me move towards writing such applications and also the scope and moving towards developing in this way?

Are their any technical/security issues with this?

This post will help me decide to look into project like CouchDB (and maybe Dive into Erlang later) or stay with the conventional frameworks (like django) and SQL databases.

Update

A specific point of such apps I had in mind is creation of offline applications just by replicating couchdb data on client.