Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Rails like framework for Clojure.

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#11

Post by sunkencity »

weavejester wrote: post #10
sunkencity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rails is a pretty mature framework these days, and it's got tons of plugins that are actually easy to use. It's a pretty steep road to get something up to those standards. When I need something that has everything already neatly solved and ready for cranking out stuff fast -- I always chose rails. I'm currently trying to learn clojure and enjoying it immensely. It's a lot like ruby (powerful and fun) but with easier…

Out of interest, what's the advantage to being "more enterprise" in this case? Having a webserver with a working REPL seems like a rather useful thing to have.

Yes, that is very useful, in a way that's not normally possible with java.

But it is very nice to just give a .war file to techops. They know what to do with it, and how to keep such an application running and reboot it should it be needed. It's nice to not have to write custom init.d scripts.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#12

Post by weavejester »

mattrepl wrote: post #3
drcode wrote: post #2

Although Clojure is an excellent tool, keep in mind it is still in early development. It can be used to publish simple websites pretty elegantly, but for now it is relatively "low level"- I would say it still has a ways to go before being "Rails like."

Aside from having access to all the Java web frameworks, Clojure has Compojure and Conjure on the higher level and Ring (equivalent to Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack) for lower level. I wouldn't discount Clojure as not ready for complicated web applications based on it's young age; Java servlets can be written in Clojure. Not that Java servlets are great, but they are widely used for non-trivial web sites. Clojure is…

Compojure is built on top of Ring, but can wrap a Ring "handler" function in a Java servlet.

This functionality has been merged into Ring 0.1, so you may now be able to wrap a Conjure application into a Java servlet as well.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#14

Post by sunkencity »

arohner wrote: post #9
sunkencity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rails is a pretty mature framework these days, and it's got tons of plugins that are actually easy to use. It's a pretty steep road to get something up to those standards. When I need something that has everything already neatly solved and ready for cranking out stuff fast -- I always chose rails. I'm currently trying to learn clojure and enjoying it immensely. It's a lot like ruby (powerful and fun) but with easier…

"just leave a screen with slime and emacs running on your server" Another way to do it is just load the swank jar on your server (the server side of slime). In your server startup, include a call to (start-swank). Then you can connect via slime whenever you want using M-x slime-connect, and you don't need emacs + screen to stay running. I've only learned the JVM as part of learning clojure. What advantages would a .w…

Advantages:

Easy to get a server running: just install tomcat or jetty on your production machine, sftp the war file and it automatically deploys.

Init.d scripts are tricky to write and get right, by using a tested script from a distro things tend to work out of the box.

Monitoring -- easy to hook in some monitoring script that can reboot tomcat or jetty should the server stop responding.

Techops generally know how to deploy a .war file -- I would not feel comfortable telling someone to learn lisp just to deploy a webapp.

pretty interesting with swank -- need to look into that.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#16

Post by arohner »

sunkencity wrote: post #14
arohner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just leave a screen with slime and emacs running on your server" Another way to do it is just load the swank jar on your server (the server side of slime). In your server startup, include a call to (start-swank). Then you can connect via slime whenever you want using M-x slime-connect, and you don't need emacs + screen to stay running. I've only learned the JVM as part of learning clojure. What advantages would a .w…

Advantages: Easy to get a server running: just install tomcat or jetty on your production machine, sftp the war file and it automatically deploys. Init.d scripts are tricky to write and get right, by using a tested script from a distro things tend to work out of the box. Monitoring -- easy to hook in some monitoring script that can reboot tomcat or jetty should the server stop responding. Techops generally know how t…

The war file and swank shouldn't be mutually exclusive, I just haven't bothered with a .war because by default Compojure starts Jetty itself, and I didn't want to bother with compiling the .war and restarting the server to test changes. Once you get addicted to reloading code from your IDE, you don't want to go back. :-)

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#17

Post by masklinn »

Rails is a Ruby framework, Django is a Python framework. Each one uses the strengths and idioms of its implementation language to be and become better.

These ports don't make sense. Clojure is not Ruby, there will always be a disconnect between Clojure as a language and a framework ported from Ruby.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#18

Post by jacquesm »

arohner wrote: post #9
sunkencity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rails is a pretty mature framework these days, and it's got tons of plugins that are actually easy to use. It's a pretty steep road to get something up to those standards. When I need something that has everything already neatly solved and ready for cranking out stuff fast -- I always chose rails. I'm currently trying to learn clojure and enjoying it immensely. It's a lot like ruby (powerful and fun) but with easier…

"just leave a screen with slime and emacs running on your server" Another way to do it is just load the swank jar on your server (the server side of slime). In your server startup, include a call to (start-swank). Then you can connect via slime whenever you want using M-x slime-connect, and you don't need emacs + screen to stay running. I've only learned the JVM as part of learning clojure. What advantages would a .w…

> What advantages would a .war provide?

Deployment. If you have a procedure in place that handles versions of the server side code using .war files then you can simply give the sysadmins a new war to deploy and that will be that.

It's convenient because it is just a single file, if you want to roll back just move the old war file in to place, do 10 seconds of housekeeping and you're back up. Not that anybody ever had to revert to a previous version of their production code, of course. But in that hypothetical case...

Another advantage would be if you've automated your deployment across a large number of servers using this method. Update the master, send the signal to 'fetch and deploy' to the rest of your servers and that's it.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#19

Post by runevault »

macmac wrote: post #15
devin wrote: post #13

http://github.com/danlarkin/madison is another interesting project. I believe the intent is to port Django to Clojure.

...but last commit was in April.

Yeah, Dan hasn't touched it much last I saw. I was interested early on as I had spent a bit of time in Django (not a ton) but was more interested in Clojure web dev. But due to it's lack of movement I haven't bothered.

I may take a look at this one but I dunno, I don't have the ties to Rails to give that appeal.

Re: A Rails like framework for Clojure.

#20

Post by macmac »

masklinn wrote: post #17

Rails is a Ruby framework, Django is a Python framework. Each one uses the strengths and idioms of its implementation language to be and become better. These ports don't make sense. Clojure is not Ruby, there will always be a disconnect between Clojure as a language and a framework ported from Ruby.

...or Rails in Clojure will turn out even better than the original. It is not as if Clojure lacks the meta-programming power has made Ruby Rails so elegant.
Post reply on HN