Pablo Fernandez

I recently attended Clojure Exchange 2015 London, the conference organized by Skills Matter for Clojurians. Like many other attendees I was impressed by the quality of the talks and as a presenter, I was particularly pleased that only a few hours later my presentation, What is a Macro?, was already published, in video form, for everybody to see.

Some presentations I found particularly interesting were:

Yada for RESTfull APIs

Malcolm Sparks presenting Yada in RESTfull web service in Clojure, two different approaches. Yada is a library to create RESTfull APIs that focus on succinctness and on doing as much work for you as possible so you only focus on your business model. Yada is also async-ready and you can stream results. We will consider using it instead of Compojure-API in the future, although we still have to explore how to integrate it with other Clojure components. One limitation it has is that it can only work with Aleph, because the other web services don’t provide back pressure.

Clojurescript: Architecting for Scale

Kris Jenkins presenting his pattern in ClojureScript: Architecting for Scale. Kris shows us how he writes ClojureScript single page applications so he doesn’t end up with a spaghetti of code. The pattern is implemented as a library that he just released for the conference, called Petrol. We are happy to see how close the pattern is to our favorite one, as provided by Re-frame, that we use in Ninja Tools and we plan on using in future projects. Clearly the reactive pattern seems the way to go to write client applications beyond Hello World.

Duct, Covered with James Reeves

James Reeves presenting his aggressively simple framework for writing web applications with Clojure in Duct, Covered. You might know James as weavejester, the author of compojure, environ and so many other super popular libraries. Duct is his take on the web framework arena. It can be said to be similar to Luminus, but its emphasis is in the set up of a componentized system. Something that is easier to ignore at first and comes back to bite you later on. I had a private conversation with James after his presentation and I’m really excited about the future of Duct.

Compared to other conferences I’ve been to, it surprised me how many authors of popular open source libraries and tools we had on stage and that made me wonder how many were in the audience that I didn’t know about. I wished I had better visibility into this as I think cooperation makes for a better ecosystem.

One problem I see in the Clojure world right now is fragmentation; we are all inventing our own ways of doing things instead of compromising a bit, cooperating, and making some ways of doing things faster, better, more tested, friendlier, better documented, and so on.

Saying that, the experience was brilliant and I already bought my ticket for next year’s Clojure Exchange at the bargain price of £95.00+VAT. Do you have yours?