Server side as a stateless service vs server-side rendering and REPL help developing a project

[ecsmix]

Hi Everyone,

How are you?

I would like to understand more about the topics described below about types of server side uses, why Clojure cannot be used as SSR as other language frameworks, more work?

What’s more, does everybody uses the repl giving immediate feedback of code, on the fly, without the need to run the program/function(s)?
Do you know how do I set up this on Intellij / Cursive?
Is it with the port?

@Yogthos

Since Clojure doesn’t have popular server-side frameworks, it’s a common pattern to manage the UI with client-side frameworks like re-frame and implement the server side as a stateless service. On the other hand, Python frameworks tend to be focused more around server-side rendering. Treating the server as a stateless API makes it easier to add other clients such as mobile apps, and to scale horizontally.

Another piece of tooling that makes Clojure development more productive is the editor integrated REPL. Any code you write, you evaluate in the REPL straight from the editor. The REPL has the full application state, so you have access to things like database connections, queues, etc. You can even connect to the REPL in production. So, say you’re writing a function to get some data from the database, write the code, run it to see exactly the shape of the data it produces. Then you might write a function to transform it, and so on. At each step you know exactly what your data is and what the code is doing.

[seancorfield]

@ecsmix

why Clojure cannot be used as SSR

It can: using Hiccup or Selmer to render HTML (from data structures or from HTML templates, respectively). For the most part, that’s how we use it at work. We have one customer-facing app built with React.js that has a stateless service on the back end written in Clojure. We have several apps written in Clojure that do server-side rendering (three are customer-facing, three are internal-facing).

The author was just saying that it’s fairly common with Clojure(Script) to write an SPA (Single Page Application) that manages state on the front end and uses a stateless back end service – so you have one language on the front and the back.

As for the REPL, yes, at work we do all our development in/with a REPL and we start/stop the components of the app from within the REPL. To be clear, we do not type into the REPL. We connect our editor to the REPL (we use a mix of Emacs/CIDER and Atom/Chlorine at work) and we type into the editor and use a hot key to evaluate forms into the REPL as we work. Watch Stuart Halloway’s presentations on REPL-Driven Development and Running With Scissors for more insight into that sort of workflow (I’ll leave it to you to Bing/Google those so you can choose whether to read the talk transcripts, read the slides, or watch videos of the talks, since all those options are available I believe).

[ecsmix]

@seancorfield

The author was just saying that it’s fairly common with Clojure(Script) to write an SPA (Single Page Application) that manages state on the front end and uses a stateless back end service – so you have one language on the front and the back.

With SSR, easy??

Cool, I learnt how to do that on Intellij, kind of…not functions at the moment…with alt+shift+P.

I thought would be on the fly without any commands like on Nightcode and Light table.

[seancorfield]

I’m not sure what you’re asking at this point.