An Architect's View

With Clojure 1.4.0 available and Leiningen 2 in preview, I felt it was time to update FW/1 and the FW/1 template to have updated dependencies.

FW/1 now uses Clojure 1.4.0, Ring 1.0.2 and Enlive 1.0.0. The FW/1 template has been updated and verified for use with Leiningen 2 (as well as Leiningen 1.x).

Both FW/1 and the FW/1 template are now at version 0.1.0 and available from Clojars. See the README on the respective Github repos for more details.

A problem was with reported running FW/1 1.2 on OpenBD 2.0.2. It turned out to be a bug in how OpenBD resolves Java method calls and it only manifests in two of the example Application.cfc files (not in the framework itself). You can now download v1.2.1.zip which contains the updated examples. Note that the User Manager example has never run on OpenBD (and, obviously, the Flex test in the remoting example won't run either).

Further, the problem with onError() still seems to be present in OpenBD 2.0.2 so if your FW/1 application hits an exception and triggers onError(), it'll fail with a message about "Variable EXCEPTION does not exist". Just rename framework.cfc's onError() method to disable it's exception handling (you'll see there's a comment above that method explaining this long-standing problem).

I was chatting with @iorayne a.k.a. Raynes (IRC) a.k.a. Anthony Grimes today in #leiningen about changes required for plugins in the upcoming Leiningen 2.0 release. I was interested in updating my lein-fw1 plugin so it would work with both Leiningen 1.x and Leiningen 2.0. Raynes pointed out that lein-fw1 was really just a template - it generates new skeleton FW/1 projects - and that Leiningen 2.0 was incorporating his lein-newnew plugin as the default 'new' task. He suggested I rewrite lein-fw1 as a template that would work with Leiningen 2.0 and, if you install the lein-newnew plugin for Leiningen 1.x, it will work with that too. The result is fw1-template. The usage instructions are on that Github page but it installs just like a regular Leiningen plugin (lein plugin install...) and if you already have lein-newnew installed, you're good to go. Since lein-newnew is part of the migration path for moving from Leiningen 1.x to 2.0, I'm declaring lein-fw1 deprecated and recommending folks use fw1-template instead (and, yes, use lein-newnew!).

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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