Saturday, December 26, 2009

Clojure Start Again

Clojure start again

It's my other attempt to learn Clojure.
The landscape has changed a lot since last time I took a look.

Toolbox

Some tools that I used to play comfortably

Building and dependency tracking

Most popular is unfortunately Ant in building Clojure. I'm not looking forward to editing build.xml files again.
But there are two alternatives that keep track of dependencies, and do packaging.

Leiningen - build tool

Leiningen is a build tool for Clojure designed to not set your hair on fire.
That certainly sounds nice. Installation is straightforward as well, following Zefs instructions does the trick.
It boils down to this:
cd ~/bin
wget http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein
chmod +x lein
lein self-install
Leiningen is wrapping up Maven2 in nice Clojure syntax and gives you by default access not only to Maven Central Repository but also clojars.org.

clojure-maven-plugin - build tool

Another option is clojure-maven-plugin Maven2 plug-in to help you out with Clojure.
Adding following snippet should get you started:
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>com.theoryinpractise</groupId>
<artifactId>clojure-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.3</version>
</plugin>
</plugins>

Clojuresque Third option

Responses I received after publishing this post showed third option that I've missed.
It is used by ClojureQL and certainly has supporters. It lacks a bit of documentation but ClojureQL - Where are we (going)? describes process quite well.

IDE

There is quite some options here, following one is most popular amongst Clojure developers.

Emacs + SLIME

Well normally I use VIM, but after watching Dynamic Interactive Webdevelopment I took for a spin Emacs, well Aquaemacs.
Following two posts were very helpful in setting up nice environment:
After some problems that got solved by setting up swank-clojure-classpath my new IDE was up.
And it welcomes me with message: Connected. Your hacking starts... NOW!

Lets get learning Clojure.