You really don't though. Clojure ecosystem consists of lots of mature libraries. Luminus http://www.luminusweb.net/ http://www.luminusweb.net/ will wire them up

You really don't though. Clojure ecosystem consists of lots of mature libraries. Luminus http://www.luminusweb.net/ http://www.luminusweb.net/ will wire them up for you in a standard way. All you have to do to make a new project is something like: lein new luminus myapp +postgres +auth And you're good to go. Everything is setup, and you just have to add the code relevant to your application. It's also worth noting that the nature of how web apps are built has changed over the years. Everything used to be done server-side, with the client just rendering HTML for the most part. A big framework makes sense in that context. However, SPA approach is the popular way to build apps today, and all the UI logic lives client-side. The server becomes just a set of service operations, that are ideally stateless for scaling. You really don't need anything too fancy on the backend with that approach.