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

Using your Java knowledge


Knowing Java and your way around Java's threading APIs gives you a great advantage, since Clojure relies on the tools that you already know.

Here, you'll see how to use threads and you can extend everything you see here to execute other services.

Before going any further, let's create a new project that we'll use as a sandbox for all of our tests.

Create it, as shown in the following screenshot:

Modify the clojure-concurrency.core namespace, so that it looks similar to the following code snippet:

(ns clojure-concurrency.core)

(defn start-thread [func]
  (.start (Thread. func)))

It's easy to understand what's happening here. We are creating a thread with our function and then starting it; so that we can use it in the REPL, as follows:

Tip

java.lang.Thread has a constructor, which receives an object implementing the runnable interface. You can just pass a Clojure function because every function in Clojure implements runnable and callable interfaces. This means that you...