clojure-news-feed VS biff

Your question is interesting to me. As a software architect, I study various tech stacks and programming languages. I concentrate mostly on open source and microservice architectures. I usually start with implementing the same feature identical rudimentary news feed microservice. Over time you start to see the similarities and differences between the various implementations. I blog about this over at https://glennengstrand.info and the source code can be found in https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed

You are looking for a decision on what programming language and tech stack to learn next based on career mobility. Here are some questions to consider.

What kind of company are you most interested in working for? Think about the size of the company. Is it in a growth market or is profitability more important? Is it a technology company? Does the CEO view technology as a profit center or a cost center? Do they have a CTO? If they do, then who does the CTO report to, the CEO, the CIO, or the COO?

What kinds of programming languages and tech stacks are on the career pages for the kinds of companies that you are most interested in? Different kinds of companies tend to cluster around different tech stacks. There are other factors to filter for such as how deeply do they embrace remote work or commute distance to where you currently live or are willing to move to.

These are lagging indicators. They are going to be more accurate than leading indicators but that also might indicate that whatever you learn next based on these factors might have a shorter shelf life.

Finally, you should ask yourself what about your current programming language do you like? Try to pick something that you would also like. The Go programming language was originally invented as a better C and is enjoying some marketability right now. Maybe that would be something to look at.

I have a github repo where I implement a feature identical microservice in various tech stacks. I started that repo with a Clojure version that used community provided wrappers. See https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed/blob/master/... as an example of calling Cassandra. Recently, I added another implementation with Clojure that just called the Java drivers directly. See https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed/blob/master/... for that version of the same call. In the end, I decided to forego wrappers and make the calls directly because you end up with fewer dependencies and are more likely to be able to use latest versions of everything.

I have been exposed to many different tech stacks over the years. This https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed repo contains the code used to evaluate thirteen different stacks which is what I can share publicly. What I can say is that the best choice of tech stack depends on what is being called for. Is this for an early stage startup or an intrepreneurial greenfield project? Is this for an MVP or just the next component in an already formalized microservice architecture? What are the skillsets of the developers that you will have access to? Have you reached agreement that you can throw it all away and start over or are you expected to have to live with the choice of tech stack for the life of the product? Are you mobile first? These are all important questions that very much shape the decision.

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...