kit VS clojure-cli-config

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Luminus has, in theory, been superseded by Kit: https://kit-clj.github.io/ but even so it is still "an opinionated bundle of libraries" rather than a framework.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

Programming Clojure 3rd edition does have some minimal coverage of the CLI but it just barely made it to publication and a lot has been added since. You might find the CLI guide (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) and CLI reference (https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli) to be helpful for some questions. The Practicalli guide (https://practical.li/clojure/) has a number of good pages and resources on repl, tools, and use.

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

When I'm looking for tooling related stuff I do always check practical.li (https://practical.li/clojure/) since it probably has a good, if terse, description and mostly has links to the good documentation (or at least the best available).

4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey