> 1. Have you written, or are you writing, a web application that uses > Clojure? What does it do?
Recently started writing a webapp to display financial data, along the lines of Google finance. Although somewhat less ambitious :). > 2. Which libraries or frameworks are you using? Which versions? Enlive, latest version. (Downloaded last week, don't know the version number.) Aiming for mostly static HTML, JavaScript/JSON, a few servlets and CouchDB. > 3. What made you choose Clojure to develop web applications in? What > are the strengths of Clojure web development? * I've been doing Java/JSP web development for years, it is stable, has tons of libraries and performs well, but is somewhat cumbersome do develop in. * I've been doing a little web development in Ruby/Ruby on Rails. Development is much quicker and nicer, especially with HAML (a templating library). The disadvantage is performance issues - Ruby is lousy on numerical computation. * I had just started looking into server-side JavaScript (like Node.js). The primary disadvantage is that it is very new and unproven, and there are few libraries available yet. * I also considered Google's Go, and was aiming for a combination of Go for the heavy lifting and Ruby for templates and display. I think Clojure hits a sweet spot with better performance than purely dynamic languages like Ruby and less verbosity than Java. For me that means I can stick with one language, which is always less hassle than using several. I used Common Lisp several years back, and liked it a lot, so I welcome a modern Lisp on a mature platform. The REPL is very helpful in allowing quick iterations. Libraries are not an issue with Java underneath, and the Clojure- specific libraries seem to be in decent shape as well. The Enlive template system is simply brilliant, I know of nothing even close in conveniently separating HTML/design and application logic. All in all, I can't think of a better option at the moment. > 4. What do you think are the current weaknesses of web development in > Clojure? What could be improved? In general Clojure web development is in early stages yet, it can't compete with the maturity of Java or Ruby frameworks. But that goes with the territory, it's one of the costs of trying something new. And I can always drop down to Java if needed. Documentation is highly variable, I'm not entirely happy with having to read source code to figure out an API. For anything more specific, it's too early for me to tell, I can probably say more about it in a month or two. Perhaps database connections, although since there is plenty of DB support in Java, writing a small Clojure wrapper seems manageable. > 5. Anything else you want to comment on? Not really. Keep up the good work :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
