I agree with others that less tooling is needed then usual for clojure, however, DEFINITELY check out cursive clojure. You can do exactly what you're asking fo

I agree with others that less tooling is needed then usual for clojure, however, DEFINITELY check out cursive clojure. You can do exactly what you're asking for. Right now I am working on a back-end API, and with the REPL and Intellij+Cursive I can't imagine a smoother experience. To your point, by using clojure I can startup a debug repl, and launch the web server from within the REPL. At that point, I can a) breakpoint at any line of code and see the state of the system. b) manipulate my system in real-time and see changes in real-time without needing to recompile anything c) if I see a function and I want to see the definition, or follow the call stack to figure out which lib this particular function came from, I can do that with a single keystroke via cursive. Plus, you get all the features of inline docs, source code of function, etc (available via REPL or cursive). It's really a treat.