I have been playing with Ember.js, and generally trying to get a little at better programming in Javascript, a language I have used for years, but for which I am still a novice. I wrote the other day about Small example app using Ember.js and Clojure + Compojure + Noir and I thought I would try replacing the simple Clojure REST backend with an equally simple Node.js backend. The results of this simple exercise are in the github repo emberjs-nodejs . I leave it to you to take a look if you are interested. I will say that development with Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js seems very light weight and agile, even though I use IntelliJ for editing and project management. Starting an app takes maybe a second. Compared to, for example, Java + GWT, or even Clojure + Compojure, I find Javascript, Ember.js, and Node.js to be really a light and fun combination. It would be even more fun if I were a better Javascript programmer :-)

I have been very happy running multiple Clojure web apps using the embedded Jetty server using lein trampoline on a large VPS. I start each app on a different port and use nginx to map to each app to its own domain name. Easy and this lets me also adjust the JVM memory individually for each application. This works so well for me that I almost feel guilty trying alternatives :-) I don't know if I will permanently change my deployment strategy but I am experimenting using Immutant which is a Clojure deployment platform built on top of JBoss AS 7. After installing the lein Immutant plugin and the latest version of Immutant, then you can run the JBoss AS/Immutant using lein, and separately deploy and un-deploy web applications using lein. Pretty slick, but I am still trying to get a grip on interactive development by connecting nREPL (documentation: Interactive development ). My usual style of interactive development is pretty nice (I use IntelliJ to edit, keep the web app running ...

I use Clojure with Compojure and Noir for (almost) all of my web apps and lately I have also been experimenting with Ember.js. After buying and reading Marc Bodmer's book Instant Ember.js Application Development How-to yesterday I decided to make a very small template application using Ember.js for the UI and a trivial back end REST service written in Clojure. I used Marc's Ember.js setup and it worked well for me. The github repo for my small template project is emberjs-clj Please note that this example is a trivial Ember.js application (about 50 lines of code) and is intended just to show how to make a REST call from an Ember.js front end app, how to implement the REST service in Clojure, and not much else. I wanted a copy and paste type template project to use for starting "real projects." You can grab the repo from github, or if you just want to see the interface between the UI and back end service, here is the code run by the Javascript UI: RecipeTracker.G...

wiki-links was created using Google's web crawl and looking for back links to Wikipedia articles. The complete data set less than 2 gigabytes in size, so this playing with the data is "laptop friendly." The data looks like: MENTION vacuum tubes 10838 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube MENTION electron gun 598 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_gun MENTION oscilloscope 1307 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope MENTION radar 1657 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar One possible use for this data might be to compare two (possibly multiple word) terms by looking up their Wikipedia pages, remove the stop (noise words) from both pages, and calculate a similarity based on "bag of words", etc. Looks like a great resource! Another great data set from Google for people interested in NLP (natural language processing) is the Google ngram data set that has ngram sets for "n" in the range [1,5]. This data set is huge and not "laptop fr...