ring VS hiccup

* HTTP: Ring is the de facto way to manage HTTP request (see https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Concepts). Jetty and Aleph are common web servers (and https://github.com/clj-commons/aleph) that implement Ring interface.

https://youtu.be/LcpbBth7FaQ (really cool live coding session with REPL-driven development for a ring web app)

> In the HTTP handlers it makes sense that you don't have return values, because: What would you do with that value exactly?

I think that approach used by clojure's ring shows an elegant way to represent http responses https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Concepts#responses. They are essentially structs with the following fields:

status := number

headers := map of string->string

body := stream | string | seq | inputstream

Request handlers are handed a request struct that is similar. The handler is a function that maps a request to a response (it doesn't actually write to streams itself).

I like this style for an http library for a couple of reasons:

1. HTTP resources can be viewed as functions whose domain is the request, and range is the response. Having the abstraction match that makes for really nice code.

While you won't find your Spring here, you will find that many of those web libraries will tend to use or produce Hiccup, return Ring maps or maybe have pipelines built using interceptors. Composing libraries together is usually not that hard, but it does require you to leave the comfort zone of the framework's abstractions to try to understand what is actually happening e.g. when someone makes an HTTP request and something is returned and displayed in the browser.

On that note, are you able to support everything required by the ring spec?

You can check out my example project in Clojure with using Ring.

It uses already mentioned ring api (https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki).

I've tried to pair down to the simplest example which shows the issue, and raised it here as I couldn't see one you'd already created or similar: https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/issues/436 This is so that I have something to link to/follow from our side, hope you don't mind, and many thanks for the diagnosis!

Not equivalent, but arguably more useful for manual authoring: Emmet [0] was all the range a while back, and I still use it to write HTML. It comes naturally if you're used to writing CSS-like selectors, and mostly gets out of the way.

DSL-wise, I've rather enjoyed Clojure's Hiccup [1].

[0] https://emmet.io/

[1] https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup

* Single-Page App: shadow-cljs for the build concerns (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs), Reagent with Re-frame for complex/large app (https://reagent-project.github.io and https://github.com/day8/re-frame). Even if we now prefer using HTMX (https://htmx.org) and server-side rendering (Hiccup way of manipulating HTML is just amazing, https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup).

I'd prefer hiccup.

That is why I like Hiccup/ Clojure so much: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup It is very natural to produce something resembling a document in pure Clojure data structures and then just convert it to valid HTML. I think, Reagent has some hiccup extensions that are nice like writing the class or id with a . or # notation right in the keyword describing the tag. So there probably still is some space to improve the ergonomics and probably performance. Concatenating strings still wins performance wise by a lot.

Clojure people have been doing this for a decade or so. It’s really so much better to work with. All started with Hiccup and when React came along you got Reagent and many more developments building on the idea.

You’re halfway to Clojure’s hiccup syntax[1] there.

[1]: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup/blob/master/doc/syntax...

That, or Hiccup.

I'm about to learn PureScript, coming from a functional TypeScript, Clojure and Elm background. To get a first taste for the language I thought I'd rewrite my Clojure test-app which generates static HTML files from JSON input using the (hiccup templating library)[https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup]. Is there some similar library in PureScript which would provide functions to create an HTML document and its content? I could not find anything when searching pursuit, but I might be just be using the correct search terms.

In Clojure thing are much more decentralised. We tend to use basic data structures along with data DSLs like Hiccup to build our software since this is the simplest way to convey meaning while retaining structure to perform additional data transformations.