biff VS neil

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...

So neil has a bunch of other features like project scaffolding, building, testing, adding license, etc. I really recommend you take a deep look at the repository and learn all the automatized possibilities that neil adds to your project.

Check out neil. It makes creating new deps.edn-based projects easy. It also has commands to add deps incrementally to your deps.edn with neil dep add and helps you tag new releases with neil version. You can run it in a REPL if you want, but as you can see below, it runs pretty fast in the shell. $ brew install babashka/brew/neil $ time neil new scratch play Creating project from org.corfield.new/scratch in play neil new scratch play 0.09s user 0.06s system 54% cpu 0.280 total

Full-featured test runner: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha

If you install neil (https://github.com/babashka/neil), you can do `neil add test` which will automatically set up cognitect-labs/test-runner in your project. Then you can run tests with `neil test` (just an alias, you don't have to use it).

> I used Kit to bootstrap this project and the way it set up tests doesn't even work, but this was what most people recommended to me for starting a Clojure project

I don't really like the approach that Kit takes and prefer something more opinionated like Biff. I'd love to hear your feedback if you do end up trying out Biff.

For some common tasks, neil is also an option.

Let's setup a basic project that includes a logger. I think the nicest way to get a new project up is with one of the tools that Borkdude has created, called neil. If you have this installed, just run the following in an empty directory:

When I see legit anger and frustration in these comments, I also think about the newcomers who might be turned off by the funky syntax just to generate a template. That said, my solution to this wasn't to add another complaint to the thread, but to add the neil new command to solve this problem for tools.deps going forward.

There is also neil which offers some features to make working with deps.edn a little easier.