Experimenting with Clojure + Ember.js and ClojureScript with Om

For a personal project I want to make a web app with a "rich client" interface. I had originally planned to write this app in Haskell with the Yesod web framework. However, as much as I like Haskell, I do still have occasional time wasting problems with cabal, Yesod, and sometimes with non-pure Haskell code. My gut feeling is that I will get things done faster if I use Clojure.

In the past I have experimented using Clojure and Ember.js but until today I have not spent much time with ClojureScript and Om (I have written web apps using ClojureScript, so the learning curve is trying to use Om).

Getting started with Om is straight forward. I used the chestnut lein plugin to create a new Clojure + ClojureScript + Om project. The chestnut plugin is very nice - it set up a reasonable development environment without having to go through a learning curve. After experimenting with the generated project, I then starting substituting in code from David Nolen's Om tutorial into the skeleton project that the chestnut lein plugin created.

I am not much of a user interface expert, and I am not sure how much time I will devote to learning Om. If I earned my living doing web apps, this learning curve would be very worthwhile. I usually use simple tools to make web apps like: Ruby + Sinatra, sometimes Rails, often Clojure + composure + hiccup.

A few years ago I did experiment with Ember.js and created small projects on my github account to experiment with Ember.js with various backend services. Today I cleaned up my embers-clj sample project. I removed the use of the old noir library and made this a straight-up compojure app. I also changed the JavaScript Ember.js application to remove two deprecation warnings.

I am leaning towards using Ember.js, mostly because I already am familiar with it. I also like the combination of Ember.js with a node.js backend (my started project for Ember.js and node.js is also on github). There are advantages to using JavaScript for both client and server sides but I like Clojure better.

Comments

  1. Unknown6:11 PM

    I found Om to be rather complex as well and ended up using Reagent (http://holmsand.github.io/reagent/) instead. I would definitely recommend taking a look at it if you're looking for a ClojureScript React wrapper that's simple and effective. I actually ended up adding support for it in Luminus, so setting up a project for Reagent is as simple as lein new luminus myapp +cljs

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more