Book Image

Clojure for Java Developers

Book Image

Clojure for Java Developers

Overview of this book

We have reached a point where machines are not getting much faster, software projects need to be delivered quickly, and high quality in software is more demanding as ever. We need to explore new ways of writing software that helps achieve those goals. Clojure offers a new possibility of writing high quality, multi-core software faster than ever, without having to leave your current platform. Clojure for Java developers aims at unleashing the true potential of the Clojure language to use it in your projects. The book begins with the installation and setup of the Clojure environment before moving on to explore the language in-depth. Get acquainted with its various features such as functional programming, concurrency, etc. with the help of example projects. Additionally, you will also, learn how the tooling works, and how it interacts with the Java environment. By the end of this book, you will have a firm grip on Clojure and its features, and use them effectively to write more robust programs.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Clojure for Java Developers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a new project


Leiningen can help us create a new project using templates, there is a wide variety of templates available and you can build and distribute your own in Maven.

Some of the most common types of templates are:

  • Creating a jar library (the default template)

  • Creating a command-line app

  • Creating a Clojure web app

Let's create a new Clojure command-line app and run it:

lein new app getting-started
cd getting-started
lein run
# Hello, world!

Project structure

Leiningen is similar to other Java development tools; it uses a similar convention and allows for heavy customizations in the project.clj file.

If you are familiar with Maven or Gradle, you can think of it as pom.xml or build.gradle respectively.

The following screenshot is the project structure:

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, there are four main folders:

  • resources: It holds everything that should be in the class path, such as files, images, configuration files, properties files, and other resources needed at runtime.

  • src: Your Clojure source files; they are ordered in a very similar fashion to the classpath.

  • dev-resources: Everything that should be in the classpath in development (when you are running Leiningen). You can override your "production" files here and add files that are needed for tests to run.

  • test: Your tests; this code doesn't get packaged but it is run every time you execute the Leiningen test.

Creating a standalone app

Once your project is created, you can build and run a Java standalone command-line app quite easily, let's try it now:

lein uberjar
java -jar target/uberjar/getting-started-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
# Hello, World!

As you can see, it is quite easy to create a standalone app and it is very similar to using Maven or Gradle.