I installed on my local system the CouchDB database, without any problem. Then I tried the given Ruby code to access the DB. It's really easy as CouchDB has no query language, but it uses http messages as directives; so, as I supposed, the Ruby code worked flawlessly.
THEN, I tried the Java code. I'm still trying it.Unluckily, as you can see on this page,
http://couchdb4j.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/index.html
the documentation is lacking. I'll work on this during the next days to make it better.