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Clojure-powered Startups

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11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#11

Does it make sense to try using both Clojure and Rails in web app, Rails for UI and Clojure for more sophisticated business logic?

I would say yes if you build the Clojure component as a separate service that the Rails app makes calls to. Or I guess you could simply build it as a Java class and use Rails to execute it.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#12
post #5

Hotelicopter also runs on Clojure. And I would recommend Colin Steele's description of his decisions as CTO, as he took the codebase away from PHP, first to Ruby and then to Clojure. The bit about the failures of Ruby are (in my opinion) the most interesting. Basically, it was too much work to get Ruby to go fast enough, and their problems were solved by using Agents in Clojure. This I think is the key bit of the sto…

From this description it seems that Erlang/OTP would be even better choice than Clojure: we literally pack million of concurrect users into 1 high memory AWS instance.

Though Erlang not as modern or elegant as Clojure, but there is also LFE and Joxa.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#13
There are two ways (and of course, the paths in between) you can run your startup

1 - You can go for the most popular languages: VB.NET, PHP, etc. Very easy to find people, lots of plugins, lots of support. This may be the way to go if you want something simple done in a small budget

2 - You can go for the niche languages: Haskell, Clojure, Go. that's more or less the "hipster hacker" way of doing things. Very difficult to find someone that can do even a Hello World, but once you find, they can write a scalable website in about 3 lines and connect to the newest nosql db in 2 lines more. This is good if you're the next twitter, fb, etc and your servers begin to melt even if serving login

(but then again, fb is in PHP and they added 'magic' in HipHop and infrastructure)

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#14

Does it make sense to try using both Clojure and Rails in web app, Rails for UI and Clojure for more sophisticated business logic?

It should interact pretty well with JRuby on Rails, but I'm not sure you would get any benefit from using rails over a Clojure web framework like Noir.

I had a look at it but it's pretty young. I would prefer more mature framework.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#15
post #11

Does it make sense to try using both Clojure and Rails in web app, Rails for UI and Clojure for more sophisticated business logic?

I would say yes if you build the Clojure component as a separate service that the Rails app makes calls to. Or I guess you could simply build it as a Java class and use Rails to execute it.

Yeah I am interested in the scenario with using Clojure-written web services.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#16

There are two ways (and of course, the paths in between) you can run your startup 1 - You can go for the most popular languages: VB.NET, PHP, etc. Very easy to find people, lots of plugins, lots of support. This may be the way to go if you want something simple done in a small budget 2 - You can go for the niche languages: Haskell, Clojure, Go. that's more or less the "hipster hacker" way of doing things. Very diffic…

Yup Facebook and Yahoo are PHP. Google/Amazon/eBay/Walmart.com are all primarily a combination of Java and C++.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#17
post #5

Hotelicopter also runs on Clojure. And I would recommend Colin Steele's description of his decisions as CTO, as he took the codebase away from PHP, first to Ruby and then to Clojure. The bit about the failures of Ruby are (in my opinion) the most interesting. Basically, it was too much work to get Ruby to go fast enough, and their problems were solved by using Agents in Clojure. This I think is the key bit of the sto…

From this description it seems that Erlang/OTP would be even better choice than Clojure: we literally pack million of concurrect users into 1 high memory AWS instance. Though Erlang not as modern or elegant as Clojure, but there is also LFE and Joxa.

It depends on how many external libraries you need. We considered both Clojure and Erlang in our project, ended up going with Clojure mostly because of available and easily accessible Java libraries.

I still find it amazing that I can:

1) add a single line to my project.clj (which will set up dependencies and download libs),

2) add a single line to my :import section at the top of the source file,

3) there is no point 3. Just call Java libraries.

But the choice really depends on your application.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should interact pretty well with JRuby on Rails, but I'm not sure you would get any benefit from using rails over a Clojure web framework like Noir.

I had a look at it but it's pretty young. I would prefer more mature framework.

Look at torquebox.org and immutant.org. You can run ruby and clojure on the same JVM and they can interop in a few ways.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#19
post #6

I've hijacked a couple of components at Game Closure in Clojure, much to the chagrin of our CTO. (Just kidding, kinda.) For the places we've used it, Clojure has worked wonderfully. The only disadvantage is that few engineers know it, and few are willing to pick it up because they're afraid of it. But if I were starting a new startup, I'd pick Clojure over anything else, hands-down.

The only disadvantage is that few engineers know it, and few are willing to pick it up because they're afraid of it.

That's the advantage.

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