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Comment by ibdknox | Hacker News Reader

Zak's characterization is basically correct. Noir isn't really a replacement for those things, more of an abstraction over them. It was born out of seeing how a real web-app evolved and what was missing from the ring/compojure/hiccup stack as I built http://www.typewire.io. Also, as I mentioned in one of the other comments, I hope that it will serve as the single "package" to start with web development in Clojure, instead of having to try and cobble it together from the pieces that are out there now. By controlling all of it, I can create a much more cohesive and well defined story for helping people get started. I can also share what I've learned about maintaining websites in Clojure and hopefully encourage patterns that avoid some of the pits I fell into.

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I'm encouraged that Noir builds on top of existing tools. It indicates that our current set of web libraries is flexible and modular enough to act as a good foundation for more sophisticated frameworks.

It looks like Noir uses a custom "lein run" command to start the server. Have you considered using the lein-ring plugin, instead?

I also wonder if this isn't a result of using a Lisp. In Node.js you see an absurd proliferation of libraries that do essentially the same thing but provide slightly different syntax. In Lisp you can reuse an existing library, provide your own surface syntax and not incur any overhead.

I've found that this is a really nice "feature" of Clojure, and maybe other Lisps. Most libraries are very small and tend to all speak in terms of the same de facto standard interfaces (functions, seqs, hash maps, vectors, etc.) so they can be easily composed. Trying to fit together Java or C# libraries like this is basically impossible without some mediating standard base classes or interfaces.

Not about Clojure, and has probaby been posted before, but: http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/06/types-are-anti-modular.h...

I did originally, but I wanted more control on how middleware gets wrapped around the app, as well as the ability to have dev and production "modes". Each of these adjusts what middleware goes into the stack and how it reacts.

Ah, I see. Have you considered writing a "lein noir server" command that starts the server? That way people could use the same `:ring {:handler blah}` syntax in their project.clj file, and have their application work with lein-ring and other plugins such as lein-beanstalk.

Thanks for this - it has just worked as a good start point for me. As a grumpy person who doesn't like searching for libraries, these "low barrier to entry" and "meta-library" ideas make me less grumpy.

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