edge VS biff

I totally respect that, and Clojure could invest more in offering frameworks or even no-code platforms or such features, but the truth is it doesn't. The language very much targets the software/information engineer category in my opinion, where by that I mean, the people who are interested in not just the functional requirements, but also the non-functional requirements of performance, scale, architectural runway, future extensibility, operations, maintainability, correctness, re-usability, etc. Especially, Clojure targets those who believe a balance between all these and functional requirements is the holy grail. That's why it won't be the most correct, the most performant, the most productive, but a pragmatic balance of all these in almost equal parts.

Maybe it should also embrace the people looking to get a product out by simply using a framework, and I'd say there's more of that in Clojure today than ever before, but the community I think is more composed of the former people that I describe, which is why you don't see any attempted framework take hold in the community, because most current members are not in the group that "just want to build the product using an established framework".

I think the community has settled, ounce again, on a bit of a balanced approach, Kit (https://github.com/kit-clj/kit) and Edge (https://github.com/juxt/edge) are such hybrids. And some more direct viable frameworks have come along like Biff (https://biffweb.com/) and Fulcro (https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/).

That said, since the community is more composed of people like me, you don't see a mass move of every Clojurian switching to one of those.

So it creates some questions?

1. Is it a problem that the language targets engineers more interested in a balance between non-functional and functional?

2. Should it be mutually exclusive, or can Clojure equally serve both niche? And if so, should it, why?

3. Is the claim that you can be as productive and it is just as easy to build a product without using a framework in Clojure true? Does this apply to everyone, or only certain personalities or people with certain amount of lower level knowledge?

4. Is Clojure's marketing misleading? Are people looking to just "build the product using an established framework" mislead in thinking Clojure will offer them salvation?

5. Where do most developer fall in, if they don't fall in the category Clojure currently targets, than does that mean Clojure cannot become mainstream? To go mainstream does it mean you have to target frameworks because there are more developers looking to just make a product using a framework?

I don't have answers to these, I'm just trying to define the current state and what the problem with it might be, or if it even is a problem.

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...