An Architect's View

About a week ago, I blogged about how to get started with ClojureScript and FW/1 and I showed some basic DOM manipulation functions that go down to the JavaScript metal. In any real world project, you're not going to want to do that - you'll want to leverage a battle-tested, industrial-strength library for that... something like jQuery for example. Using an external JavaScript library with ClojureScript isn't entirely straightforward, unfortunately, mostly due to how names are exported and how the Google Closure compiler munges them in its efforts to produce minified code.

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There's been quite a bit of buzz about ClojureScript since it's launch last July but it is a fast-moving target and a but daunting to get started with. Fortunately, there's a simple Leiningen plugin called lein-cljsbuild that can make it pretty simple to get up and running!

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A minor bug fix update has been applied to both master (2.0) and develop (2.1_pre) to correct a small regression in buildURL() that was introduced late in the 2.0 cycle. Thanx to Seb Duggan for spotting this!

After a long period of testing out in the wild FW/1 2.0 reached RC2 back in October and no further bugs have been reported. Only documentation remained and that has now been completed. FW/1 2.0 is gold and can be downloaded from FW/1's RIAForge site. Happy Holidays!

I try not to pay much attention to popularity contests but I was just browsing Github today and happened to notice that FW/1 is both the "most watched overall" and "most forked overall" ColdFusion project on Github. Thank you!

It's pretty easy to get a Clojure web application up and running on Heroku. Heroku's Dev Center has a good Getting Started with Clojure article that shows you how to install the Heroku client and get your ssh keys setup. It has a very basic "Hello World!" Ring application as the example but you'll probably want something a bit meatier to play with. Here's how to get the FW/1 for Clojure example application running on Heroku...

Follow that Getting Started guide to get Heroku setup but when you get to the "Write Your App" section, do the following:

git clone git://github.com/seancorfield/fw1-clj.git
cd fw1-clj
heroku create --stack cedar
git push heroku master

You should see several screens of output flash past as Heroku downloads all the dependencies needed to build and run a FW/1 application and then you should see something like this at the end:

-----> Discovering process types
       Procfile declares types -> web
-----> Compiled slug size is 11.3MB
-----> Launching... done, v4
       http://some-domain-1234.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku

Go to that URL in your browser and you should see the User Manager example application! (some-domain-1234 will be whatever domain Heroku has allocated for your web application)

After that, just edit your application, commit it, and push it up to Heroku. Heroku will update the dependencies if necessary and redeploy your application. It's that simple!

Now that FW/1 is available for Clojure, you might have looked at the examples that are in the FW/1 github repo and wondered how to create your own FW/1 application from scratch.

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After two years in the CFML world, FW/1 (Framework One) comes to Clojure!

Intended to bring the same simple, lightweight, convention-based MVC web application development that has proved so popular in the CFML world to the world of Clojure, FW/1 for Clojure is available on Clojars (0.1.0, as of April 2012). If you clone the github repo, you'll see a "user manager" example application which is a port of the same app from the CFML version of the framework. The documentation is, as always, a work in progress but covers the basic API and how to create a driver program for the framework in Clojure. More information on the rationale, approach and API of FW/1 can be found on the FW/1 (for CFML) wiki. I plan to adapt this for the Clojure version shortly...

This fixes some bugs in buildURL() but is otherwise identical to the first FW/1 RC - see the blog post about the RC for more details.

Framework One 2.0 just reached Release Candidate status. Apart from documentation updates, there no remaining open issues.

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