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What would a 'Clojure on Rails' framework look like? I think that's the primary reason why such a framework has yet to find traction; there's no single, obvious

What would a 'Clojure on Rails' framework look like? I think that's the primary reason why such a framework has yet to find traction; there's no single, obvious way to go about it. The efforts made so far in this space have taken many different approaches, because they're all experiments. Explorations of what an idiomatic Clojure web framework might potentially look like. Clojure has been around for over a decade now, and it's fairly mature as a language; but it's ideology is young in comparison to more established paradigms like OOP. To make matters more complex, Rails came to prominence in an era where web applications were mostly of one type: server-side HTML with a sprinkling of JavaScript. Nowadays there tends to be more options, e.g. a web application may consist of a single HTML shim, with a thick React client that talks to a GraphQL back end. So on the one hand we have a language that's still exploring its identity; on the other we have a rapidly changing idea of what a web application should be. My guess is that an idiomatic Clojure web service would look like a client-accessible relational database with a strong security model and datalog queries, along with some system for adding in side-effectful hooks to respond to data change. In other words, something rather different in design to Rails.

janetacarr 4y ago
Thanks for the reply James. I agree with everything you said. To clarify, I'm not advocating to re-create Rails for Clojure, rather, I'm arguing open-source efforts are too focused on the search for Clojure's Big Web Framework TM. However, I do like your guess as to what a Clojure Web service might look like.
- huahaiy 4y ago
  Your observation is simply not true. To the contrary, the consensus of the community seems to be that there's no need for a rails-like framework for Clojure. Most of Clojurians are satisfied with what we have in the Web front, and are not worrying about the lack of "big Web framework" at all. I don't know where you got your impression from.
  - janetacarr 4y ago
    I got that impression from the relentless amount of web frameworks for Clojure that keep popping up. Anytime I see Clojure on the front page of HN, it's about some new Clojure web framework, so this post is a protest of that in a sense. The big web framework is an idea, one where people won't reinvent the wheel over and over again, so that we can have a lot more non-web packages for Clojure. I'm quite literally saying, the effort could be better spent elsewhere.
    - huahaiy 4y ago
      I don't think the HN mentions of Clojure is representative of what the Clojure community thinks. If you are talking about the frontpage of HN, it is even less representative. The Clojurians slack, Clojure Reddits and Clojurverse are more representative, and you can hardly see anything about Web frameworks in those places.
    - seancorfield 4y ago
      I must admit, I do not understand why (some) people seem to get so excited about the latest "Web Framework" for Clojure, over and over again. Yes, there seem to be a lot of them but they are mostly failures -- they rarely get any traction, and the creators often quickly move on (several to other tech altogether). I don't think those people would have directed their efforts into other things -- libraries -- to any degree that would mitigate some of the other points in your article. People tend to work on what interests them and if someone wants to design and build a web framework, persuading them not to isn't going to encourage them to work on a "more useful" library I suspect. I think the abandoned API library problem is real but partly because they were wrong-headed in the first place: Clojure is designed as a hosted language, specifically to take advantage of the vast, mature ecosystem that already exists on the JVM. When we got started with Clojure at work over a decade ago, it was common to see "all-Clojure" as a mindset and reject interop as a solution. I think that has changed a lot over the years and people now leverage interop and Java libraries as a "first solution" these days, perhaps with a thin wrapper around those libraries just to provide a more fluid, more functional approach. At work, we've certainly taken a conscious decision to switch away from "all-Clojure" where there are mature Java libraries that are reasonable to use via interop (unless, of course, the "all-Clojure" equivalent is very well-maintained and really adds a lot of value).
suprfnk 4y ago
Something like Phoenix? Elixir is a newer language, with a lot of similarities to Clojure. Phoenix even made the most loved web framework in the Stack Overflow 2022 survey. Why did they converge on something so, apparently, great, in such a low amount of time? And why is this so hard for Clojure? Not taking sides or trying to be negative, just honestly curious what the driving factor is.
- weavejester 4y ago
  I haven't used Elixir enough to be particularly confident in an opinion about it. However, Phoenix appears to have a similar design to many other MVC frameworks, and if a conventional design works for a language, there's less need to experiment. Initial development can converge around something that's tried and tested. A conventional framework doesn't fit Clojure particularly well, so the community has been forced to tread new ground to figure out what works with the language.
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  - jmcgough 4y ago
    Elixir is a functional language as well, and borrows inspiration from Clojure in particular. I haven't dug into Clojure enough, but I'm curious why you think a conventional MVC-style framework wouldn't be a good fit (not that the article is making this argument).
    - didibus 4y ago
      Elixir is still Actor based though, and relies on modeling behavior through something very akin to objects. You could even call it OOP if you went back to the more original message passing/late binding roots of OOP.
newlisp 4y ago
along with some system for adding in side-effectful hooks to respond to data change Curious, can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
- weavejester 4y ago
  So, for example, email verification. There could be a watch that triggers when a new user is inserted into the database, and this triggers a side-effectful function that sends an email.
ativzzz 4y ago
> Nowadays there tends to be more options, e.g. a web application may consist of a single HTML shim, with a thick React client that talks to a GraphQL back end. Best part about Rails is that you can do this as well. Rails has done a great job of being adaptable to new web technologies.

janetacarr 4y ago

Thanks for the reply James. I agree with everything you said. To clarify, I'm not advocating to re-create Rails for Clojure, rather, I'm arguing open-source efforts are too focused on the search for Clojure's Big Web Framework TM. However, I do like your guess as to what a Clojure Web service might look like.

huahaiy 4y ago
Your observation is simply not true. To the contrary, the consensus of the community seems to be that there's no need for a rails-like framework for Clojure. Most of Clojurians are satisfied with what we have in the Web front, and are not worrying about the lack of "big Web framework" at all. I don't know where you got your impression from.
- janetacarr 4y ago
  I got that impression from the relentless amount of web frameworks for Clojure that keep popping up. Anytime I see Clojure on the front page of HN, it's about some new Clojure web framework, so this post is a protest of that in a sense. The big web framework is an idea, one where people won't reinvent the wheel over and over again, so that we can have a lot more non-web packages for Clojure. I'm quite literally saying, the effort could be better spent elsewhere.
  - huahaiy 4y ago
    I don't think the HN mentions of Clojure is representative of what the Clojure community thinks. If you are talking about the frontpage of HN, it is even less representative. The Clojurians slack, Clojure Reddits and Clojurverse are more representative, and you can hardly see anything about Web frameworks in those places.
  - seancorfield 4y ago
    I must admit, I do not understand why (some) people seem to get so excited about the latest "Web Framework" for Clojure, over and over again. Yes, there seem to be a lot of them but they are mostly failures -- they rarely get any traction, and the creators often quickly move on (several to other tech altogether). I don't think those people would have directed their efforts into other things -- libraries -- to any degree that would mitigate some of the other points in your article. People tend to work on what interests them and if someone wants to design and build a web framework, persuading them not to isn't going to encourage them to work on a "more useful" library I suspect. I think the abandoned API library problem is real but partly because they were wrong-headed in the first place: Clojure is designed as a hosted language, specifically to take advantage of the vast, mature ecosystem that already exists on the JVM. When we got started with Clojure at work over a decade ago, it was common to see "all-Clojure" as a mindset and reject interop as a solution. I think that has changed a lot over the years and people now leverage interop and Java libraries as a "first solution" these days, perhaps with a thin wrapper around those libraries just to provide a more fluid, more functional approach. At work, we've certainly taken a conscious decision to switch away from "all-Clojure" where there are mature Java libraries that are reasonable to use via interop (unless, of course, the "all-Clojure" equivalent is very well-maintained and really adds a lot of value).

suprfnk 4y ago

Something like Phoenix? Elixir is a newer language, with a lot of similarities to Clojure. Phoenix even made the most loved web framework in the Stack Overflow 2022 survey. Why did they converge on something so, apparently, great, in such a low amount of time? And why is this so hard for Clojure? Not taking sides or trying to be negative, just honestly curious what the driving factor is.

weavejester 4y ago
I haven't used Elixir enough to be particularly confident in an opinion about it. However, Phoenix appears to have a similar design to many other MVC frameworks, and if a conventional design works for a language, there's less need to experiment. Initial development can converge around something that's tried and tested. A conventional framework doesn't fit Clojure particularly well, so the community has been forced to tread new ground to figure out what works with the language.
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- jmcgough 4y ago
  Elixir is a functional language as well, and borrows inspiration from Clojure in particular. I haven't dug into Clojure enough, but I'm curious why you think a conventional MVC-style framework wouldn't be a good fit (not that the article is making this argument).
  - didibus 4y ago
    Elixir is still Actor based though, and relies on modeling behavior through something very akin to objects. You could even call it OOP if you went back to the more original message passing/late binding roots of OOP.

newlisp 4y ago

along with some system for adding in side-effectful hooks to respond to data change Curious, can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

weavejester 4y ago
So, for example, email verification. There could be a watch that triggers when a new user is inserted into the database, and this triggers a side-effectful function that sends an email.

ativzzz 4y ago

> Nowadays there tends to be more options, e.g. a web application may consist of a single HTML shim, with a thick React client that talks to a GraphQL back end. Best part about Rails is that you can do this as well. Rails has done a great job of being adaptable to new web technologies.