clojure-news-feed VS kit

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.

Clojure using for the server side https://github.com/kit-clj/kit

htmx for frontend, using the built-in kit htmx module.

I am not sure what a web framework is, to be honest. The choices for many parts of a web application are really domain-specific and I'm not sure a single "framework" would work for everyone.

As far as web-related components go, my app uses Rum (as an interface to React), ring, http-kit, pushy (for history manipulation), sente (for websockets), buddy (for authentication tools).

If you are looking for a batteries-included "I want to have some sort of webapp right away" thing, I think https://kit-clj.github.io would fit the bill, but the general feeling in the Clojure community is that unlike Python with Django or Ruby with Rails, the choice of app components is not predetermined by the language.

Luminus has, in theory, been superseded by Kit: https://kit-clj.github.io/ but even so it is still "an opinionated bundle of libraries" rather than a framework.

I learned by using https://luminusweb.com/docs/clojurescript.html to get me started. It gives you a plethora of sane starting points, and you can just work on switching it to your own business logic. Troubleshooting and adding functionality will usually lead you to understand how things work. The authors of luminus have moved on to build kit: https://kit-clj.github.io/ which is probably another good starting point.

The cljs stack I hear about a lot (and use) is ShadowCLJS with reagent (https://reagent-project.github.io/) and re-frame (https://day8.github.io/re-frame/). ShadowCLJS is more of a build tool, but is really well documented and easy to use. Reagent is basically react but a simpler API, and re-frame is a layer on top of that provides data subscriptions and event-handlers to manage app state. It's overkill for some apps but I find it's actually super easy to work with and not as much complexity as I thought.

For backend there is luminus (https://luminusweb.com/) or Kit (https://kit-clj.github.io/). They are basically project templates that wire together a ton of popular solutions for various things - database access, migrations, security, html templating, etc. Also includes frontend frameworks like re-frame if you want.

The component itself is just a thin wrapper for conman, you can see it here.

Here’s me: https://luciano.laratel.li/

I was happy I could get the domain! Pretty simple hand-rolled server-rendered site using the kit-clj[0] and neat-css[1]. Main backbone of the site is here[2]. I used to use a CLJS SPA but it was overkill and not as nice to use (load times particularly.)

[0]: https://kit-clj.github.io/