Clojure Weekly, Feb 6th, 2015
Welcome to another issue of Clojure Weekly! Or should I say biweekly? I'm deep into an Haskell project these days (God forbid) so my daily Clojure is reduced. Despite this annoying bit, here's the latest issue. That’s it, enjoy!
Clojure for Lispers transcript Oldie but goodie, here's a transcription of "Clojure for Lispers", one of the first public presentation Rich ever gave after making Clojure public. Its full of philosophical perls, especially toward the end, where the plan for Clojure world domination is revealed in more details: continuations, tail recursion, lexical scope, classes and OO and whatnot. Good to have it a searchable form if you don't want to watch the entire video to find for a specific bit.
xsc/rewrite-clj Well description is pretty much all you need to know. The background of this is a talk by @cgrand that I enjoyed a while ago, talking about challenges in editor parsing and formatting. Space and indentation preserving transformations are not an easy problem but this library seems to contain all the necessary tooling. It also allows zipper traversal that is space/ident-aware. Use when your project requires styled output of Clojure forms.
ptaoussanis/sente So the time has come for your web-site to become "real-time". One solid approach is certainly server-side push over one of the technologies available, such as WebSockets. But then you have to handle a few things, like reconnections, browser differences, message encoding, Ajax fallback and much more. Sente implements that thin layer on top of this bidirectional communication. It is based on http-kit (so you can expect those 600k+ concurrent connections) and core.async (the best model out there to handle async events from inside a terse API).
trptcolin/clojureslim Fitnesse is the venerable tool that allows input for acceptance tests as tables. In testing automation process it could be a nice tool to put in front of a customer to obtain verification for a feature (and maybe input a few more rows of tests). Over the years it got maintained and expanded. Slims are the "plugins" that allow Fitnesse fixtures to be written in other languages. Of course there is one for Clojure, although it appears to be in its initial state of 3 years ago. Nonetheless, I'm happy to give it a go for some project of mine that fits very well the table model.
clojure/tools.namespace tools.namespace is a required dependencies for so many projects that it could be already in your path without you noticing. It provides accurate reloading capabilities for namespaces, an essential feature for any live coding tool, being this the repl or other kind. Code analysis libraries for instance need to walk source folders to inspect namespaces and load them. It's also a fundamental piece in components systems, where the restart of a component often means reloading of the corresponding namespace (and dependencies).
semperos/clj-webdriver Years have passed since I last developed some browser automation. Well, glad to see how easy it is now, but remembering very well how low level it used to be. Anyway, great clj wrapper around Selenium web driver. As expected the lispy aspect translated into a pleasant automation API called Taxi. It's all well documented and samples are easy to find. The user group is alive and answering questions. Setup a working example was literally 3 lines of clojure.