Wednesday 18 May 2016

I'm alive - and I've been hacking ClojureScript

TL;DR: I've been making a thing. It's not finished, but I might hold an interest long enough to finish it. Test instance of this thing is running on Heroku. Sources are in the prehistoric IM-project github repo of mine. Try it if you will, don't if you wont. There's only friend-requests, friendship and the basic messaging implemented.

With that done, hi. It's been a while. The timesinks after the last blogpost last august have been: I accidentally found myself in a romantic relationship, graduated a year early (well, I've done all the required coursework. It still remains to be seen if the bureacracy shall grant me the degree) from the polytechnic and related to that, I've been doing little projects here and there which either have never been finished enough to write a blogpost of or have required secrecy. After writing my thesis I relocated to Tampere. Then I began hacking.

I tried to apply to a Clojure job in this city. By doing that I also found out I'm probably not going to get employed if I can answer the question "Have you any experience on ClojureScript?" only with "None whatsoever, but I can try if you give me the specs". Well, after reviving the prehistoric IM-project design and hacking a server in Clojure and a client in ClojureScript in a couple of weeks, I can now answer "Yes, I know ClojureScript" and show what I've done with it.

The client is implemented with Reagent, the cljs-wrapper for the React - javascript framework. Had I been doing this in Javascript, I'd feel somewhat dirty right now, but with Reagent building the stateful UI was just building the dom as a clojure tree. With re-frame MVC what-ever managing the state of the app was even easier than in a traditional desktop app. Even though the introduction was a pain to read, I quite like what it does and will search if there's anything like it for the desktop apps using Seesaw.

On the server side it's a pretty basic ring/compojure rest api, using PostgreSQL and designed to be run on Heroku as easily as possible.

How shall I develop it further?

Issue-tracker provides a rather nice roadmap and a snapshot of the current status. It's easyish to break the ui with large display image (now that I think of it, it provides a nice xss-ish attack vector too), the user can't change their own details after registration and there are a few rough edges in the UI.

After admin-ui is done and the image sizes are limited, I'll probably research how websockets work and try to make real-time poll-less notifications with them.