The lein-try plugin is one of the more stunningly useful "little pieces" of software that you can have available if you're developing in Clojure. Simply add the plugin to your user profile (in ~/.lein/profiles.clj) and then lein try some-dependency will fire up a REPL with the specified dependency on the classpath. Today, I needed a simple HTTP server running for a short while, serving up static assets from a specific folder tree. Instead of messing with my local Apache setup, I used lein-try to fire up a [...]

This was my second time at The Strange Loop. When I attended in 2011, I said that it was one of the best conferences I had ever attended, and I was disappointed that family plans meant I couldn't attend in 2012. That meant my expectations were high. The main hotel for the event was the beautiful DoubleTree Union Station, an historic castle-like building that was once an ornate train station. The conference itself was a short walk away at the Peabody Opera House. Alex Miller, organizer of The Strange Loop, [...]

Framework One for Clojure version 0.2.1 is available. The easiest way to get started is via Leiningen and the fw1 template: lein new fw1 myapp This creates a minimal web application in the myapp folder that can be started like this: PORT=8123 lein run Now you have FW/1 running on port 8111 (via Jetty). What's new in 0.2.1? The big new feature is Django-style HTML templating (via the excellent Selmer templating library). You can see an example view template here: usermanager example list view. You can s[...]

The first annual Lambda Jam (US) conference was held at the extraordinarily beautiful Intercontinental hotel in downtown Chicago, a few blocks from the lake. Lambda Jam was unusual in a couple of ways: First off, it specifically targeted a broad range of functional programming languages - and only functional ones; Second, it aimed to be much more hands on than normal conferences by having regular "lecture" sessions only in the morning and turning the whole afternoon over to workshops and "jams". Overall,[...]

The slides and code for my first presentation at cf.Objective() 2013 are now online - Polyglot Lessons to Improve Your CFML: Learn You a What for Great Good slides (PDF) Learn You a What for Great Good code (Github) The other presentations will be posted after I've given them and the code will appear in that Github repository.