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Comment by blueberry | Hacker News Reader

If this is an easy way to create a web app that adds two numbers on Clojure, I'd say Clojure is not ready for web development yet.

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Huh. 45 LOC for templating, routing, and form processing and you don't need to configure a different webserver since jetty is production quality. Do you have links to something that takes less effort than what is being illustrated here that can be deployed immediately into production and perform well?

Not to mention: middlewares, logging, stack traces, exception handling, testing, production/dev environments, e.t.c. in a similarly succinct manner.

Agreed. This strikes me as a more robust walk-through than traditional Hello World-esque tutorials; as such, there is a little more to do than you'd expect. I'd rather have the details provided here, and I suspect many other hackers would too.

It's interesting. I read your comment through the "backtype version" below the article, and, because it was out of context, I interpreted your meaning to be exactly the opposite of what I see it is now.

http://pastebin.com/PsecNBvB

(To be honest, I think clojure has its purposes, but a one-off calculator page isn't one of them. Use the right tool for the right job and all that.)

What point are you trying to make? That one can write less code if one does less stuff?

The parent asked for a link to something that takes less effort, I obliged. I don't think the amount of code is a particularly useful metric in most cases, but I would argue that the PHP+HTML solution is much clearer and easier to deploy, and taking into account everything you wish about such a simple web page (readability, maintainability, cross-server, security, etc.), takes less effort in the end. (I don't have any big issues with jetty or tomcat, since I use one or the other almost daily.) I'm sure there are larger use cases where clojure is simpler than raw PHP, but that's why PHP has frameworks.

why are some people so lazy and short sighted.

"time to make trivial webapp" is NOT a good reason to choose anything.

Are you serious? 45 LOC is not a good metric btw, why are you omitting all that boilerplate configuration. Any reasonable tutorial on PHP/python/RoR would build something more sophisticated more concisely. Here is a python tutorial: http://www.turbogears.org/2.0/docs/main/ToscaWidgets/forms.h...

There are a contingent of Lisp users who really, really, really like this fgen style, for EVERYTHING. I—as someone who's worked in the industry on lots of startup-level projects—think it's only useful for small, regular snippets. There is also this false-metric effect in play; there are only 45ish lines in one file here, so it must be elegant and great amirite?

But a real webapp would have lots of templates and lots of files.

Where Clojure really shines in web development is when you mix it with cgrand's Enlive templating engine (http://github.com/cgrand/enlive), which is an amazing project with lots of active development. This approach is so cool that even a lot of the Rails and Python startup folks are starting to copy it.

I think the point of the article is to cover the absolute basics using Ring, not advocate any particular style of development. I mean the title of the blog post does say it all.

Having written a lengthy Enlive tutorial, http://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial, I of course swear by it and scoff at inline html generation :D So I prefer coupling Ring+Enlive+Moustache (and tasty Aleph) myself but that would be an awful lot to cover in a single blog post now wouldn't it ;)

All in good time.

I suspect we could do it easily. Talk to me on twitter (my name here is my name on twitter) and let's see if we can hammer out an elegant way to describe that coupling.

I need the writing practice anyways.

I'd love to see a fork of adder that used Ring+Enlive+Moustache.

Your Enlive tutorial is excellent. Thank you.

Actually, it's an easy way to: - add two numbers - build the project with dependencies - display stack traces - deliver static files - generate html from code - validate user input - host with a web server - reload the web server during development - handle url routing - log requests - create custom middleware - deploy to EC2

You may have glossed over some of the details.

No, I didn't gloss over the details with the possible exception of deployment to EC2. Most of the stuff you listed are a prerequisite to web development. For most other languages/frameworks database connection would be included too.

Perhaps you meant to say that the framework used in this example is not ready. I didn't see anything about Clojure the language that makes the example complicated.

As far as the framework is concerned, the example shows how to build a production deployment of the application. The author is not showing a toy teaser application. There are a lot of details there, but these are things that you would want to know if you actually want to run a production server.

I agree with this, and yes I used the word 'clojure' to mean any frameworks/web servers/middleware that can be used to code in clojure. Just like when people say "php is good for web programming" most of them actually mean php, apache, mysql and their favorite framework.

You can thank people like Mark McGranaghan for taking languages that "aren't ready for X" yet and making them so.

That is a TON if code for such a simple fiction.

That is a ton of code if the goal is writing a web page that does addition. Maybe that wasn't the goal.

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