Does Clojure have a decent web framework?
As far as web-related components go, my app uses Rum (as an interface to React), ring, http-kit, pushy (for history manipulation), sente (for websockets), buddy (for authentication tools).
If you are looking for a batteries-included "I want to have some sort of webapp right away" thing, I think https://kit-clj.github.io would fit the bill, but the general feeling in the Clojure community is that unlike Python with Django or Ruby with Rails, the choice of app components is not predetermined by the language.
I guess you weren't lying because that is not what a web framework is.
If it works for just me, that's a web framework. The fact that there are so many web frameworks shows that none work for everyone.
1. Routing
2. ORM
3. Auth handling
4. Request middleware
5. Templating (if your application requires it)
6. User input validation
Many other components that are escaping me right now
- background job system
- email sending
- translation/localisation
- a decent configuration system suitable for differentiating dev/test/staging/prod/etc, and handling both secret and non-secret values in a sane way
Not saying you shouldn't, but part of the point of a framework is all the things you don't have to write yourself.
What I like about (say) Rails secret handling is that the secrets file is an encrypted file in the repo itself. This makes it so that you can easily check out and run different versions of the repo from different times and not have to worry about that one time you renamed an envvar or something. Secrets get version controlled together with the app. The autogenerated .gitignore even includes patterns for the key files so you have to go out of your way to check them into the repo. The downside is that merging encrypted files can be a right pain in the arse, for example when two devs added different secrets in different branches.
This sounds horrible. Why does specifically your CI/CD need to know those things?
This also sounds like your CI/CD system is "too smart" and your build process is "dumb pipes", what I believe to be a unsupportable, unmaintainable anti-pattern - if people can't build/test things on their own machine, things are likely not repeatable/reproducible at all and you're one CI/CD issue away from losing your project.
> Something I dislike about spring boot is how spring-y everything has to be.
I thought spring "runtime config override" was just dropping a properties (admittedly awful format, latin-1 encoded to boot) file near the compiled project uberjar/war/ear and you're done?
You set it up so that production secrets are kept in that store and are only accessible by a 1 or 2 high level people. Developers don't have access to production secrets, only dev or staging, which live on their own machines and are lower security risk
> if people can't build/test things on their own machine
I don't see why they wouldn't be able to build/test on their own machine. You just have a different secrets store and keys than the CI/CD does
> I thought spring "runtime config override" was just dropping a properties (admittedly awful format, latin-1 encoded to boot) file near the compiled project uberjar/war/ear and you're done?
Yes I hate this. I want to be able to decide how properties are loaded, not rely on some ethereal state managed behind the scenes and not be able to see if it's loading properly. If I want to use their terrible resources/config file, I'll specify that in middleware/startup
I don't use templating, at least not for web pages.
User input validation — that's something I've spent the better part of several years working on, but in a larger context of a toolkit for dealing with forms, tables, data presentation, filtering and sorting. I daresay the solution I have now (which uses ideas dating back to Smalltalk) is way more extensive and flexible than what every "framework" out there has.
And that's why I use good frameworks.
Both of these rely on some of the most popular and simple libraries for web dev.
Most seem to simply use said libraries directly, mix and match what is needed.
If you’re an experienced web developer but new to Clojure, then you’re going to spend a good weekend or so to set up a proper environment, combine the necessary libs and so on, if you have some guidance. The Clojure community is quite welcoming and helpful in that regard.
There’s an initial learning curve, because it’s a functional Lisp though. That comes with some necessary re-wiring, but also with some unique powers.
The cool thing about writing Clojure is that feeling: „Really that’s it?“ when you realize how simple it is. It’s also simply fun to use, because of how interactive it is.
However, if you just want to get started and have a minimal thing working without much fuss I recommend this one:
https://clojure-doc.org/articles/tutorials/basic_web_develop...
I haven't directly used it but I reviewed it once and it seems to be one of the most straight forward and carefully written web development tutorials for Clojure. It uses a very minimal set of libraries and it really goes from A to Z. Perfect if you want to just get yourself familiar and have something working.
Thank you for sharing it!
This year's funding by Clojurists Together allowed me to spend a lot of time completely rewriting large sections of the site to bring it up-to-date with modern Clojure tooling and libraries -- but I know there's still room for improvement.
I love the idea of a community investing in this type of outreach (beginner oriented) and I'll be happy to contribute when I can.
[:div
[:p "I am a component!"]
[:p.someclass
"I have " [:strong "bold"]
[:span {:style {:color "red"}} " and red "] "text."]]
My main problem with Clojure was the dynamic nature of it. I have not used it in very long time now (probably 7 years at this point) - but despite the amazing aspects of it I would not trade in TypeScript annotations.
A question for clojurists here - what is the level of static type checking adoption in CLJ world ? When I was using it last time there were some things like schema validators, but nothing like TypeScript. It looks like there's static typing annotations support now but are the types widely used by popular projects/provided for big libraries ?
I do use spec, and I've used other checking solutions before. I also use :pre/:post conditions a lot, as well as plenty of assertions. But in a large and complex application the errors I'm likely to run into are not as simple as a mismatched type. My most valuable checks and specs constrain multiple data fields.
Thinking about stuff I run into, I would say that the majority of errors are due to optionality — where a key is optional in some contexts, but mandatory in others.
I feel that due to its functional nature or perhaps this is just the community bias, Clojurists tend to prefer mixing lower level libraries to build their web application instead of relying on a specific big web framework like RoR for example. Luminus would be one RoR-like system.
But today, I think people would probably choose reitit for the writing the API and use a clojurescript framework for the frontend or perhaps still use reitit to generate HTML pages using hiccup.
You compose your stack of smaller libs and build your own framework so to speak. The right questions in this context are; what http server to use, what routing lib is decent, what is a good lib for my database, what is a good lib for generating html from the server. etc.
If you wanna start using clojure as a web server. Start with 'ring', and you can recieve http requests. You quickly realize you're missing stuff to do what you need and will go searching for libs. You'll find great libs out there for anything you ordinarily need for a web-server setup.