Prerequisite on both macOS and Linux:
- Nix 2.0 package manager
nix-shell
npm install
clj -A:dev
This project was an exploration of what's possible with modern Clojure CLI tooling if we want to use ClojureScript for developing a webpage.
While it's important to keep dependencies to a minimum, having a hot-reloading development webserver is a must for exploratory, prototyping work.
Figwheel is a wellknown tool, which can provide such a workflow with a tight feedback loop.
Figwheel required quite a heavy tooling around it in the past,
but it has been simplified lately, by factoring its core out.
The result is called
figwheel.main.
It doesn't require Leiningen anymore and works well with clj.
I was trying to use https://cycle.js.org as a UI framework, but the various module systems in its transitive dependencies, just doesn't play well with the Google Closure compiler's new ES6, AMD and CommonJS support.
Cycle.js also has an amazing story for testing using a virtual time driver, so maybe it should be ported to ClojureScript, since it works with different stream libraries.
As a result I used no UI libraries, just vanilla ClojureScript and built up a minimal, non-reactive version of Hoplon, since I want to be able to visualize data at least, even without interactivity.
I little benchmark showed it's possible to render 3 smart contracts (equivalent of ~12kB HTML) 1000 times in about 2 seconds:
(time (log "Many apps" (doall (repeatedly 1000 app))))
It means we can use this approach for smaller apps and just regenerate the whole DOM, or big parts of it, a few times a second, on every change in the underlying data model.
This opens up the possibility to create vastly simpler interactive application architecture than what we see with React or Vue.js.
For that we would need some stream library though.
We have already explored RxJS, but with its hot, cold and lukewarm observers are just too much mental overhead.
xstream was made for Cycle.js, but some of the issues with Cycle came from xstream.
Bacon.js has comprehensive documentation and the community produced a lot of examples, but it's been superceeded by Kefir.js.
The most promising one is the new kid on the block: Highland.js.
Just some real-world ABI examples, taken from: https://gitlab.com/oax/dex-poc/tree/master/dex/net/4
It provides simple Clojure functions to wrap the verbose, imperative DOM API methods.
The main application which figwheel is going to refresh, along with the
styles in ./resources/public/app.css.
