I have two apps app1.jar and app2.jar, with Clojure 1.2 included in app1 and Clojure 1.4 in app2.
When I run:
java -cp app1.jar:app2.jar clojure.main
to open a REPL, it uses Clojure 1.2. Is there a way to switch to Clojure 1.4?
As with many such question the anser is use leiningen lein2 has a profiles feature that lets you properly handle multiple versions of clojure. This is especially useful because the clojure.contrib libraries are very different between those two versions. It took me longer to type this sentence than to install, configure and get a project started with leiningen. It really is worth it.
In practice you will need to have two instances of clojure running, one with each profile (version) and you can then either have two REPLs (one attached to each) or one repl (using nrepl) that you switch back and forth.
There is an unfortunate amount of old documentation on the net for Clojure that predates mass adoption of Leiningen.
Related
I was previously working with Kafka as my data source and found it very powerful but had a rather steep learning curve managed to get it partially working but had a few hitches here and there and don't feel comfortable maintaining it in production.
So decided to switch over to Rabbitmq since I am more familiar with it however I have run into a slight problem.
I am unable to find a Clojure Library for Apache Storm Spouting from Rabbitmq. Should I extend BaseRichSpout or can someone point me to a useful library.
There was no clear cut library to assist with this so I extended the
"BaseRichSpout" in java code, compiled to a jar file and imported it to clojure code.
There was quite a bit of diddling around because my Storm cluster was running backtype version i.e. older version of storm.
However this was the sample code I used.
Beginner here.
Can I compile an existing Clojure script to run it on the web using ClojureScript?
Let's say that I have a script that prints Hello world in my terminal, and I want to print that text on the browser. Should I rewrite a whole script with ClojureScript syntax, or should I just compile it using another compiler?
(ns clojure-hello-world.core
(:gen-class))
(defn -main [& args]
(println "Hello World"))
(Long answer :P)
Even though Clojure and ClojureScript share a good amount of features, there are some that are specific to one or the other. For example there are no real classes in JavaScript so the :gen-class specification in the ns form doesn't make much sense.
One important fact is that the syntax of both Clojure and ClojureScript is exactly the same, differences have to do mostly with the host VM in which they run (Java VM in the case of Clojure and JavaScript VM in the case of ClojureScript).
There is a list of the differences between the two Clojure implementations here.
There's also a tool called cljx to "write a portable codebase targeting Clojure/ClojureScript". Recently there has been some discussion on the Clojure Dev group around finally implementing feature expressions which would on one hand deprecate the use of cljx but on the other complicate the work that tools have to do to extract information from Clojure source files.
I would start with lein-cljsbuild to get started. This will get you going with a nice edit eval and look at browser loop. It's well worth getting this setup first because it makes learning ClojureScript much more fun. I promise it's worth the hassle. If you need more interactive support the folks in #clojure on freenode are very kind and helpful.
Basically, the Browser executes JavaScript. You compile your ClojureScript code to JavaScript. The Browser loads your JavaScript via an HTML page. So, you have to create an HTML Page and point your Browser at it.
The simplest way I got started was to use Luminous (http://www.luminusweb.net/docs/clojurescript.md).
However, Chestnut (https://github.com/plexus/chestnut) looks promising.
I have been learning Clojure a bit recently. Is there such a thing in Clojure world as Scala-like worksheets, into which I can put any code and get it evaluated as soon as I save it? Or maybe there's a similar solution for Clojure?
I am now working with lein repl and, sadly, can't say it's the most usable tool ever.
In Lisp development in general (and Clojure in particular) the preferred programming style is what's usually dubbed interactive programming - the developer keeps an image of the app loaded at all times and interacts with it via a REPL. You can easily modify the loaded code on the fly and test changes immediately in the REPL (that's not easy at all with Scala - one has to resort to something like JRebel to do it). I find the Scala worksheets a pretty primitive solution in comparison...
The workflow that I follow in Clojure is:
I open nREPL.el in Emacs - this loads my lein2 project with all of its dependencies and gives me a REPL which I can use the try out stuff
I write some code in source code and load the changed functions (maybe by evaluating a top level form with C-M-x
Afterwards I'd press C-x C-z to jump back to the REPL and I try out the new code in it
I go back to step 2
Basically the Clojure REPL is much more powerful than the Scala REPL and I personally consider it hugely superior to the Scala IDE worksheets. Once you get used to the interactive incremental style of programming Lisp offers everything else starts to look strangely complex by comparison. I'm not familiar with Eclipse's CounterClockWise Clojure plugin, but I'm pretty sure it offers similar functionality to Emacs's nREPL.el.
You might want to take a look at the autoexpect plugin for Leiningen. Every time you save any file in the working directory, the plugin compiles and runs your code; as a bonus, it will evaluate any "expect" function calls which can serve as tests. This is very helpful for test driven development and is a nice compliment to working with the REPL as described in the other answer (I often use one or the other or both together depending on how many test cases I have in place).
I should note that running autoexpect is far faster than running "lein test" or "lein run" repeatedly, due to the startup cost of the JVM and Leiningen.
It sounds like what you are looking for is the Clojure Koan plugin. This a worksheet-style problem-solving exercise tool that watches your edits and provides instant feedback on the correctness of your work.
For actual development workflow I second the advice others here have provided on tooling and interactive environment setup, but since you specifically said you are learning Clojure, this can be a fun approach. There is also a web application called 4Clojure that you might have fun playing with.
However you will eventually (or right away) want to get a smooth and convenient development environment set up, and I haven't seen any mention so far of a few important tools. One person mentioned Nrepl. If you like Emacs, there's a slime/swank-like interaction mode that jacks into nrepl called nrepl.el that provides very nice integration between editing files and messing around in the repl. Similarly there is VimClojure, and you can find plugins for IntelliJ (LaClojure) and Eclipse (Counterclockwise) that are also popular and well-maintained.
Someone mentioned autoexpect. If you are looking for a good TDD setup, I would recommend midje. If you are using a 2.0 preview release of leiningen there are a few issues with the lazytest integration being in flux, and lazytest itself is or should be deprecated. But I prefer midje over expectations, personally, and these problems will surely be worked out in the 2.0 release of lein-midje. The stable version of lein-midje that works with the non-preview (1.x) leiningen has autotest-like functionality using lazytest.
As nobody has mentioned it, cursive is really nice these days, although I was sad to move back to a full blown IDE. You can easily do the same thing as Emacs with the built in repl, just move into the namespace that you are working with and synchronise every time you make changes. It's a really nice way of working.
I'm doing my first steps with Clojure, but for some reason the up/down keys don't allow me to step through the command history in the REPL like in REPLs of other languages. Does the Clojure REPL use different keys to access the command history, or is this feature just not (yet) implemented?
If you are, by any chance, using a Unix-like environment you can use rlwrap to to achieve nice things like command line history and Ctrl-R for searching through it.
Just prepend your command which you use to start repl, e.g:
rlwrap java -cp clojure.jar clojure.main
Or use Leiningen or Cake. Either of these are useful in general, and you'll be happy to learn to use them, but specifically they use readline or jline automatically where available.
You can enhance the REPL to do this by using JLine, see here.
Depends which REPL you use. Most good REPLs have this functionality and more.
If you're coming from Java as an Eclipse user, for example, you may want to use the embedded nREPL provided by the Counterclockwise plugin. I found this easier to use than configuring a separate dedicated Clojure environment.
C-, M-x slime-repl-forward-input
C-, M-x slime-repl-backward-input
Go to the next/previous history item.
http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Input-Navigation.html
Sorry for the long post, but this forum always asks for use cases :-).
I am frequently called upon to write utility applications (GUI and command line) for my organization. I most commonly write these in Java and more recently Scala.
The "philosophy" in Clojure (and other Lisps) seems to center around the REPL, and I have to agree that it makes a nice development environment, but I obviously cannot produce utilities that require that the users "Install Clojure and Clojure-contrib, then unzip the utility into a directory on your hard drive, start Clojure from the command line using the following classpath, ...". The users do not care that the utility is written in Clojure. They just want to point and click or, at most, type "java -jar Utility.jar -?" on the command line.
My question centers around compilation and separating the application into many namespaces/files.
I know that the main method must be in a Clojure file that includes the (gen-class...) command (or the :gen-class clause on the ns command). Do I do the same for the additional Clojure files, or should they be left as a source code that is packed in the JAR and loaded by the main file? How about testing the additional files from the REPL during development?
I have been using leiningen, cake, and maven to build self-contained JARs (containing unpacked clojure.jar, clojure-contrib.jar, and commons-cli.jar files), but so far I have been writing my code in the same file as the main method.
It's up to you whether you AOT-compile your .clj into .class or let Clojure do it dynamically at runtime. In general, I find it's easier during development to avoid AOT and just use AOT as a performance booster for cases where the cost of compiling your .clj on the fly doesn't make sense (limited environments like Google App Engine or utilities where startup time is critical). For server processes that will run for a long time, there is not much advantage in AOT-compiling.
There are a number of complexities around using AOT classes at dev times that are specific to different dev environments.
One down-side of AOT is that your compiled classes might be incompatible with a future version of Clojure and that is more likely than your clj files being incompatible. That may become more important over time.
When it comes to the separation, I'd keep them in separate namespaces/files:
One for the :gen-class namespace, containing -main and all the other Java-like things.
The other namespace for all the functions.
Ideally, your main should contain just the call to a function from the other namespace, or perhaps some logics for evaluating or repacking of the args.
Your question seems quite similar to the separation between logics code and ui code. You could see the namespace with :gen-class as just an interface provided by your program to Java code, nothing more.
When it comes to the utilities (like command-line, or Swing apps, etc.), there's a trouble with Java in general because of the JVM start time.
Now, you could solve this by making a server app run the REPL in the background all the time, and say, somehow receive an s-expr to be evaluated, and return the result. This could be done as a simple web application which receives an s-expr as URL parameter, and returns the result. Now, with this you could make all utilities in plain old Java, or even bash using wget, since all you'd have to do is access an URL (assuming that server with repl is running in background).
There's a good chance that something like this already exists, so if anyone knows - comments are more than welcome.
Oh, and another thing, the port where repl webapp is exposed would probably have to be closed to the outside world, to prevent Clojure-injections :D