Introducing Immutant - a true, enterprise-grade application server for Clojure | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Immutant - a true, enterprise-grade application server for Clojure

immutant.org

53 pointskoevet18 comments

I'm not really familiar with what an application server is (even less what makes it enterprise-grade).

What is the typical use-case for this or TorqueBox?

I had a similar issue. It'd be worth expanding the description to be more concrete. What I see there now seems more marketing/management focused than focused at the people who are likely to actually be using it. :)

Yeah, I looked up the wikipedia page for JBoss and it was just acronym soup.

Yeah, they need to simplify their 'messaging'.

Oh, and see here for what an applicaiton server is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server

TorqueBox's home page explains the use-cases well.

I'm not sure either. I can tell you this. A couple of days ago I tried using TorqueBox with JRuby. After struggling a little getting the right JRuby (within TorqueBox) to get started and finding out what to do with Rakefiles, I managed to get a simple "Hello World" kind of Ruby (Rack) app running with it in-loco. I just went to the directory of the config.ru file. Created a Rakefile there. Then ran commands like rake torquebox:deploy and then rake torquebox:run

It started the JBoss process and at the end of it loaded my simple app. I tested it a little on the browser and ran the Apache benchmark tool on it like ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8080/hello

After it had warmed up, further benchmark runs were much faster.

On my weak hardware, going up to 2.2k requests/second or something. I was like "wow! Give me more of that." Not really that it couldn't be matched by other technologies for that kind of stuff, but that it was a single process easily configured.

If we think that the same process could be shared by many other scripts, programs and so on, it's a good way to reuse all of that in innovative ways.

Deep down it's not much more than having a stable multi-threaded environment that you can rely on.

Then I thought: wait! When I started with Ruby, I was running from all of that kind of complexity!

It's as if we were being assimilated by Java again. Only this time we don't have to use so much Java or xml.

Here's the best answer I could come up with: http://bit.ly/wtfenterprise

Disclaimer: I'm a TorqueBox/Immutant developer

Right off the bat you guys need to spend a teeny weency bit of time and rebrand yourselves. The logo reminds me of a counter-strike clan from 2001.

So, where is the code?

Under the "Development" tab?... https://github.com/immutant/immutant/

I really can't see this flying. Not even most Java guys want the added complexity of an "enterprise application server" anymore.

No, we don't, but we often don't have a choice; that choice is made for us by PHB's and astronaut architects. And in my case, banks, who are my company's main customers.

The whole world isn't Silicon Valley; there are a lot of us out here who don't get to do the new-ooo!-shiny all the time.

Very, very true. But it seems to me that the people who want this sort of thing (people who make decision on golf courses) don't really like the sound of Clojure.

Although I'm fully aware some firms are dysfunctional, it seems to require a strange alignment of the planets for someone to decide on using immutant.

What is "enterprise grade"?

I believe it means it's slow, unreliable, and expensive.

Oh and there will be some certification program to train people in it.

Seems like they are talking about clustering, load-balancing, etc.

     #lisp
     11:01 < TimoT> aren't enterprise solutions like regular solutions but cost 
     10-100x more?
     11:01 < jsnell> they also don't work

Something marketed towards MBA's - not coders.

maybe for coders that have to deal with MBA's

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