Hey, I'm Ryan from RethinkDB. I wrote the OP blog post and I'm working on a follow-up that demonstrates how to use the Java driver in various alt-JVM languages.

Hey, I'm Ryan from RethinkDB. I wrote the OP blog post and I'm working on a follow-up that demonstrates how to use the Java driver in various alt-JVM languages. You can take advantage of Clojure's Java interop to use the new official Java driver in Clojure, but it doesn't offer a very good user experience compared to clj-rethinkdb. It will work for a lot of simple cases, but it gets weird very quickly. When you define a function in Clojure, the underlying Java object is an IFn[0]. Unfortunately, you can't pass an IFn to native Java methods that expect to receive a Java 8 lambda (an anonymous class with a single method). You can work around this limitation by manually creating an object that conforms with the client driver's various ReqlFunction[1] interfaces, but it's not very pretty: This ReQL expression in Java: r.table("fellowship").map(x -> x.getField("name")).coerceTo("array").run(conn) Becomes this in Clojure: (-> (.table r "fellowship") (.map (reify com.rethinkdb.gen.ast.ReqlFunction1 (apply [this, x] (.getField x "name")))) (.coerceTo "array") (.run conn)) Note the use of reify and the ReqlFunction1 interface. You need to be careful to pick the interface that matches the arity of your anonymous function. For example, if you have four parameters, you use ReqlFunction4 instead of ReqlFunction1. You could probably do some voodoo to abstract away some of the ugliness, but the way that clj-rethinkdb's r/fn macro works under the hood and translates into the wire protocol is frankly a lot more elegant than anything you could do with our official client driver and Clojure's Java interop IMO. That said, I'm not particularly well-versed in either Java or Clojure, so there may be something I'm overlooking. I hope this explanation is helpful to somebody. :-) TL;DR: use clj-rethinkdb if you want to write sane-looking ReQL in Clojure. [0]: https://clojure.github.io/clojure/javadoc/clojure/lang/IFn.html https://clojure.github.io/clojure/javadoc/clojure/lang/IFn.h... [1]: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/blob/next/drivers/java/src/main/java/com/rethinkdb/gen/ast/ReqlFunction1.java https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/blob/next/drivers/jav...