biff VS malli

I definitely believe Clojure needs a rails. Not only will it help beginners get started, if it can help people get started faster and build fast like Django and rails do, I think it'll help more with adoption.

Biff and fulcro seems like they have a shot at this

Biff- https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff

Fulcro - https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro

Jacob is doing a fantastic job with https://biffweb.com/ If the Clojure community would focus more of its manpower on such projects, then I think we can make Clojure the obvious choice to start a software business, by saving an insane amount of time. And time is by far the scarcest resource in a startup.

If you can get away with not using React, I highly recommend Biff. It uses XTDB and Rum by default but they can be swapped out pretty easily for Postgres and Reagent. I'm planning to publish some docs on how to do that when I have a chance.

The best one of these imo is https://biffweb.com

I'm also really liking the strategy of the old-school is new again with sever side rendering serving actual HTML instead of JSON for certain things, using HTMX, an example can be found here: https://biffweb.com/

Take a look at Biff project https://biffweb.com/

+1 for Malli and XT! For the relevant parts of Biff, see the example app's schema and the transaction reference docs. Biff has its own transaction format which includes schema checks via malli and various other conveniences, and it gets translated into XT's lower-level transaction format. Might provide some inspiration at least.

Rum is used throughout, though mostly via middleware[1], so you (almost) never see any calls to `rum.core/render-static-markup`. But all of the hiccup-style data structures (`[:div "foo"]`, etc) do get rendered by Rum.

htmx doesn't render anything on the backend; rather it gives the frontend more ways to interact with the backend. e.g. say you make an inline form--htmx gives you the ability to display/submit that form without refreshing the entire page, but all the html that's sent to the frontend is still getting rendered first by Rum.

[1] See https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff/blob/6353c406adef034448... and https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff/blob/6353c406adef034448...

Clojure's lazy sequences by default are wonderful ergonomically, but it provides many ways to use strict evaluation if you want to. They aren't really a hassle either. I've been doing Clojure for the last few years and have a few grievances, but overall it's the most coherent, well thought out language I've used and I can't recommend it enough.

There is the issue of startup time with the JVM, but you can also do AOT compilation now so that really isn't a problem. Here are some other cool projects to look at if you're interested:

Malli: https://github.com/metosin/malli

Babashka: https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clerk: https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk

BREAKING: walking a :schema passes children instead of [id] to the walker function #884

When you get to larger, more complex validations, I'd recommend checking out Malli or Spec.

for specs, you can try malli - feels pretty well supported and full featured: https://github.com/metosin/malli (i'm not 100% sure how popular it is for others, but I use it on my personal projects)

Have you tried malli: Data-driven Schemas for Clojure/Script?

All that being said, I particularly use malli and I don't find anything to complain about. There is a very nice and sound ecosystem being built around it (malli-ts is one of my contributions to it, but still in early development stages). I highly recommend reading its README, very informative stuff.

Any large codebase can be broken up into small isolated components that can be reasoned about independently. This is how you structure Clojure projects if you want them to be maintainable. Clojure inherently encourages doing this by defaulting to immutability. The contract between components is the data being passed to the component and returned by it. Using Malli schemas at the edges of the components is a typical approach to documenting their APIs https://github.com/metosin/malli

I see the fact that people often end up creating large and tightly coupled monolithic codebases in static languages as a negative aspect of static typing. Such codebases are difficult to reason about even if you have guarantees that the types align. Ultimately, you need to understand the relationships in code, and how they relate to business logic. The more coupling an application has the harder it becomes to reason about it as a whole.

Ideally, I think applications should be structured as a bunch of Lego blocks that can be composed together. Each component should encapsulate some functionality, and then the flow of the business logic should bubble up to the top and expressed in how these components are chained together.

Uhhh spec has existed for a long time and before that, schema Nowadays we also have the excellent malli. If his codebase is full of functions where the shape of the data isn’t obvious, isn’t documented and isn’t specified in a specific/schema, that’s on him and his bad coding practices and really no different from passing data in other dynamic languages. A class by itself (without additional effort) only gives you field names.