Yes, this is new functionality that will be released as part of RethinkDB 1.16. RethinkDB 1.16 is expected to ship in a couple of weeks.
We don't have any plans to support direct access from web clients. The main problem is security. RethinkDB doesn't have any notion of users or access privileges, so any client can e.g. drop a table. We might add this eventually, but it's low on the priority list. See <https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/266> for more discussion.