How a Clojure pet project turned into a full-blown cloud-computing web-app

The part about how so much of web application development is just translating data from one format into another, and how objects just get in the way of that process, really struck home with me. With Google's key value store mapping directly to Clojure structs, which are then handed off to the HTML generation code or converted into JSON, it's clear that including a step to map to objects somewhere in there is totally superfluous. Which is exactly what I find in developing web applications in Java on a daily basis.

It would be awesome if they posted this in a real text format rather than lots of slides with (sometimes) very small text. I highly recommend the read, very interesting.<p>Their blog has an excellent article (<a href="http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-programming-with-clojure.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-pr...</a>) on using Clojure interactively with GAE.

Can someone with recent GAE experience comment on how well it works these days? Any glaring problems, particularly with the JVM implementation? I plan to launch a Clojure web app in the next few months, and I'd love to avoid maintaining servers.

I'm regularly curiously peeking at the functional languages but I must say those slides did not convince me much - perhaps just bad choice of examples.<p>E.g. on slide 79 the sight of generating HTML through a DSL horrifies me. Littering the code with presentation details like that leads to maintenance hell.<p>Likewise in the comparison of slide 83 vs 85 I frankly don't see any difference between python and lisp in terms of verbosity.<p>So whatever point the author was trying to make - didn't work for me.

Great set of slides - I wish I could have heard the talk live. I did add his company's blog to my RSS/Atom feed.<p>I would like to spend more time with both Clojure and AppEngine and the slides were some motivation. I am still a little skeptical however that Clojure base web apps will ever have the traction of Rails (I had a 5 hour sprint today to add two major features to a customer's rails web app: would have taken a long time to do with server side Java; I would guess that Clojure would split the difference).<p>I've bought 3 Clojure books, and I would by a 4th if the author of these slides would write a web app specific Clojure book.

Nice remark on how the need for a "powerful" IDE is a code smell. The need for the IDE reveals that some abstraction the language should provide but isn't has to be handled by something else. No such problem with macros.

Forget <i>how</i> they did it. After looking at the first 20 slides, I'm more interested in getting in on the closed beta.

All I wanted was a Pepsi.

I'm interested in the project, but the author's decision to write out his lecture notes on a series of 110 slides is a bit off-putting.

fla;dr?<p><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-project-turned-into-a-fullblown-cloudcomputing-webapp#text-version" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-...</a>