The ongoing discussion for Biff [1] prompted me to re-share my post because I'd like more people to understand this "other way". Outside Clojureville, it is <i>not</i> obvious most of these Clojure "frameworks" are <i>not</i> monoliths.<p>The consummate Clojurist's <i>default</i> (and very normal-feeling way) to build a web application (or any application for that matter) is to roll their own web stack from production-grade libraries.<p>Of course, this state of affairs is a double-edged sword, just like is true for traditional web frameworks. In my post, I try to go into the whys and the wherefores, building upward from first principles.<p>[1] Biff – a batteries-included web framework for Clojure <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037426">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037426</a>
Metabase is written in clojure, if you want to see the source code of a large web app<p><a href="https://github.com/metabase/metabase">https://github.com/metabase/metabase</a>
The problem with this approach is that (esp. for hobby projects) updating stuff is a bit tedious. Let's say you have a relatively bare bones project in Rails or a PHP framework you have a couple of dependencies that people usually use together, so upgrading can be quick and painless.<p>I've now had it several times in the years-long lifespan of small clojure web projects that people have moved on and the thing (framework-ish) basically doesn't exist anymore and going by the issues it only had like 10 users in the first place.<p>It's not the end of the world, and fortunately there's not a lot of needless churn, but I guess I would prefer to have this "I am trusting project x and I only have to care about their releases (pre-testing all the moving parts) and then my 5 dependencies" and instead I have 20 dependencies/moving parts for my web app.<p>Yes, I'm lazy and I don't think it's a problem in an env where you have a proper dev workflow anyway.
a very lyrical post, i will reread at my leisure and try to apply the lessons to <a href="https://harcstack.org" rel="nofollow">https://harcstack.org</a><p>that’s HTMX, Air, Red & Cro btw<p>that said … I am a true believer in HTMX for the right amount of UX dynamism and I don’t initially get solves that piece