Fulcro Developers Guide: Single-page full-stack web applications in clj/cljs

Really good work. I spent 15 minutes reading through this book over my first cup of coffee this morning.

I stopped using Clojure about 5 years ago, after two long consulting jobs using Clojure. I decided Clojure was not a perfect fit for me (and, really, neither is Common Lisp, Racket, and Haskell - more favorite languages) but I am very happy to see the Clojure ecosystem still creating such great tools around the language and functional composition.

Nothing. I use Python for deep learning but don’t care for the language. I prefer Lisp languages, most comfortable with Common Lisp but love the ecosystem around Racket. Love Haskell but I am in a many year learning curve.

Should I be using a Modern do-it-all frameworks for Clojure and Clojurescript? My opinion is of course colored by my years spent in JAVA/J2EE's world of web frameworks ( Wicket, Tapestry, JSF + Hibernate EJBs etc.). In this world, I found most of my time was spent in learning the deep intricacies of the framework and fitting it to my use case. I began to hate every minute I spent on these frameworks.

And then I discovered Clojure and Ring and later Liberator. What I like about my current setup is that I have full control over my framework and my team knows its ins and outs and the corresponding Clojure code is succinct enough to allow developers to come upto speed quickly. Our set up is not sexy but it works and we know how exactly it works.

I am not sure what I would miss if I did not use a framework like this. Is Liberator no longer good enough ?

Does anyone have experience using Fulcro just for frontend (no backend)? I have been considering it versus Reagent and Rum for building a heavy client-side app that doesn't need a server (nothing to store in a database, local storage is fine). At some point I might add users for data sync between client and server but I don't plan to do SSR for SEO purposes at least.

What I am curious about is if I use Fulcro, will I write a lot more code to do the same as in Reagent/Rum because it's supposed to play well with a backend that's (for now) non-existent? Does it provide better tools for client-side state management compared to Rum/Reagent (+ re-frame)?

Right now I am using just Rum with its built-in cursors and derived atoms and the experience is okay. I did try DataScript but ended up just with a simple atom for now.

In my experience -- I was a professional Clojure developer for 6 years (until 2018), and hung out in the #clojure IRC channel on freenode a lot between 2011 and 2014 -- the Clojure community tends to be very experienced. Clojure is not many people's first language, but tends to be a language you find your way to after dissatisfaction with other languages, or exposure to other lisps.

I'm sure you can find crappy or charlatan Clojure devs, but I was generally impressed with the Clojure devs I met in #clojure or at the cons. Overall I found the community to have high levels of both knowledge/experience and patience in explaining things thoroughly and precisely to people who were asking questions.