Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By : Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo
Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By: Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo

Overview of this book

The Clojure Workshop is a step-by-step guide to Clojure and ClojureScript, designed to quickly get you up and running as a confident, knowledgeable developer. Because of the functional nature of the language, Clojure programming is quite different to what many developers will have experienced. As hosted languages, Clojure and ClojureScript can also be daunting for newcomers because of complexities in the tooling and the challenge of interacting with the host platforms. To help you overcome these barriers, this book adopts a practical approach. Every chapter is centered around building something. As you progress through the book, you will progressively develop the 'muscle memory' that will make you a productive Clojure programmer, and help you see the world through the concepts of functional programming. You will also gain familiarity with common idioms and patterns, as well as exposure to some of the most widely used libraries. Unlike many Clojure books, this Workshop will include significant coverage of both Clojure and ClojureScript. This makes it useful no matter your goal or preferred platform, and provides a fresh perspective on the hosted nature of the language. By the end of this book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Clojure and ClojureScript.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
2. Data Types and Immutability

Introduction to the Application Layer

Until now, we've been creating ad hoc functions, testing them out at the REPL, occasionally creating a namespace or two that brings them together. We can think of the application layer as bringing all those namespaces and functions together into a working, coherent application with an associated API. In essence, we are designing the backend of our application in this step. We will then learn how to expose that API via REST in the next chapter; it will be useful to bear that in mind as we design our application.

When designing our application layer, it makes sense to take a step back and ask what our requirements are. If we consider the activity tracking application, we might realistically have the following high-level requirements:

  • Create a new user.
  • Create an activity for a given user.
  • Query users and activities.
  • Run reports across individual users (that is, by activity or time period).

Implementing the preceding...