In this chapter, we focused on the development environment for the Helping Hands application. Since Clojure is our language of choice for implementation, we first looked at the history of Clojure and Lisp and understood why it is well suited for our use case. We also looked at the REPL environment and two build tools for Clojure—Leiningen and Boot. Further, we defined a reference Leiningen project configuration for our application and learned how to run an application and test it. We also learned how to generate documentation and reports, and how to create a deployable artifact. At the end, we briefly looked at the Clojure IDEs that can make our application development work easy.
In the next chapter, we will learn about REST specification. We will learn how to define REST APIs for microservices in the Helping Hands application that can help with direct messaging among the services.