Experimenting with Clojure 1.3 and Noir 1.2

Noir is a Clojure "mini framework" that is built on top of Compojure. Chris Granger released a new version today that is updated for Clojure 1.3. After working mostly in Clojure last year but using Clojure not very much this year (lots of work for a Java shop) I decided to check out both Clojure 1.3 and Noir 1.2 this afternoon - and I liked what I saw.

The Noir example application uses a recent version of clj-stacktrace and stack traces are much better: Noir prints a well formatted stack trace on any generated web page if an error occurs. This stack trace is very good, filtering out information that you really don't want to see, identifying where the error occurred, and with usually a useful error message.

This eliminates the only major complaint I have ever had with Clojure. Very cool!

The Noir web site had a link to an article written by Ignacio Thayer on running a Clojure Noir MongoDB app on Heroku, using a free MongoDB account. Worked great. I made a trivial change to src/noir_mongo_heroku/views/welcome.clj to also work with a local MongoDB service:
 (let [mongo-url (get (System/getenv) "MONGOHQ_URL")]
   (if mongo-url
     (let [config    (split-mongo-url mongo-url)]
       (mongo! :db (:db config)
               :host (:host config)
               :port (Integer. (:port config)))
       (authenticate (:user config) (:pass config)))
     (mongo! :db "db"))
Noir roughly supplies the same general level of functionality as Sinatra. Noir's development environment, like Compojure that it is layered on, supports live code reloading so if you are used to an interactive dev style like that of Rails and Sinatra, and if you like Lisp (:-) then give it a try.

I am an old Lisp hacker, starting with Lisp on a Dec 10, and getting my first Lisp Machine in 1982. I think that Lisp (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, etc.) mostly appeals to those of us who would (mostly) like to build up our own infrastructure. I say this even though some Lisps have huge libraries: Franz Lisp, Racket, Clojure (both good native libraries and stuff inherited from Java-land), etc. are certainly "batteries included" languages/platforms, but I still characterize Lisp'ers as build it ourselves types.


Comments

  1. clem10:18 PM

    Appreciate the post. I've been experimenting with noir myself, but I'm not sure how the whole package is intended to come together.

    For instance, the MongoDB code you wrote is something I would associate with the model rather than the view. I see that the example code generated by Noir includes a model directory, so does the framework support defining storage in the model and then manipulating it as a hash in the view?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant9:39 AM

    Hello Clem,

    Ignacio Thayer wrote the code in his article - I just changed a line or two.

    You are right that in a real application, it would be good to separate the models and "business logic" code from the views.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more