July 2020 Monthly Update

By Alyssa Parado

New members

Big welcome to our newest members, Roam Research and Cisco!

Cider

July 1-15

Between the unexpected wedding and my hardware issues I’m a bit behind my schedule, but I still managed to do some pretty good progress. On the bright side - I feel I’m way more productive with my new computer, especially when the GPU works. :D

July 16-31

Here’s the latest update.

I’m glad that despite some unforeseen circumstances I managed to finish the funding cycle with several major releases! There’s a bit of work in progress that I plan to finish in the next couple of weeks and I’ll credit ClojureDocs for supporting it:

Figwheel

July 1-15

The past two weeks were mostly dedicated getting React Native support up and running.

Configuring SSL certificate hosts with :ssl-valid-hosts

Added a new :ssl-valid-hosts option will let you configure which hostnames and ips the generated certificate considers valid.

React Native Support

React Native support is complete!

The minimal configuration for a React Native project in figwheel.main is now:

^{:react-native :cli}
{:main example.main}

This also supports React Native Expo CLI as well.

React Native support includes the compiler passes from Krell which allows js/require of assets like CSS and images.

Also spent time getting good production compilation support as well.

Please see the new React Native figwheel documentation for more details.

This is pretty exciting because the time to get a native app up and and under development is quite fast. Using Figwheel to do these things is great because we get the familiar Figwheel reloading patterns and other bells and whistles.

As a final test I was able to create a MacOS app via react-native-macos and it just worked without a hitch.

I really hope folks give the new React Native support a try as it’s a joy to code a native app this way.

Released figwheel.main 0.2.10

All of the above and more has been released in figwheel.main 0.2.10.

July 16-31

Fixes

Updated the figwheel.main template

The figwheel main template was in need of some major updates.

The +npm-bundle option will generate a Figwheel project that uses the Figwheel’s new :auto-bundle feature and is a quick way to get started with NPM in a Figwheel project.

I went through all the permutations of the CLI options for each to ensure that the template works for the different tools and frameworks and fixed several bugs in the process.

Added a tutorial/doc on how to use Nodejs with Figwheel

It’s always been possible to use Figwheel to develop Nodejs applications in ClojureScript. But it certainly isn’t that clear how to do so.

I added a document that shows how to set up a Nodejs application including an example of how to create a hot reloadable express application.

Much Much thanks!

A big thanks again to everyone who has come together to support this work. All in all it has allowed me to make some major improvements. My hope is that folks will find time to try out these new features, if anyone encounters any problems please let me know.

Practicalli

July 1-15

Continuous integration and deployment was the main focus of this period, with some Clojure spec generative testing.

Added Practicalli website and YouTube channel to the Clojure.org community resources.

Practicalli study group

Continuing a tools theme by setting up continuous integration (CI) for Clojure projects. The CI service partially written in Clojure provides good support for Clojure projects. Building on CircleCI to deploy Clojure applications to the Cloud using the Heroku service.

Broadcasts also cover using Kaocha generative test runner, both locally and on CircleCI

Content developed for Practicalli Clojure and Practicalli Clojure Webapps books.

Practicalli Clojure

Created several guides for new and existent projects, using CircleCI as a continuous integration service. Kaocha is also used to run generative tests as well as unit tests.

Created an introduction to CircleCI as a continuous integration service and identified and documented recommended docker images to use for Clojure deps.edn and Leiningen projects. The CircleCI examples are a little dated and includes only Leiningen project examples.

Random Clojure Function project. Created a guide to develop a project that generates a random function from the namespaces available in the REPL or the functions from specified namespaces.

Using the random Clojure function project, created a guide to develop a project with the help of CircleCI as the continuous integration service.

Banking on Clojure Updated the banking-on-clojure project using a TDD approach with Clojure spec.

Using Kaocha test runner run unit tests and Clojure spec generative tests locally and via CircleCI. Kaocha can run the same tests as clojure.spec.test.alpha/test function calls, without having to add code to the project. Adding the spect-check-plugin via the test.edn config did not run the generative tests, only the unit tests. Use the spec-test-check plugin to run the reports works when included as a command line flag.

Practicalli Clojure Webapps

Created a guide to deploy a Clojure application via CircleCI onto Heroku. Think of Heroku as AWS without the cognative load to use it, simply push source code to Heroku and it builds and deploys the resulting application.

Updated the status monitor project to deps.edn to use as the basis for a guide to deploy Clojure applications via CircleCI to Heroku (a cloud platform as a service). The project takes a simple approach so the focus remains on the continuous integration pipeline.

CircleCI has an Heroku Orb, providing common configuration for deploying to Heroku. The Heroku orb is used to deploy the project from its source code, building an uberjar and running the application from that uberjar.

Updated details of using postgresql with Clojure (documentation will be extended soon) and recommended next.java as a library to use for SQL.

Simplified the overall navigation on the Practicalli Clojure Webapps book.

Practicalli Spacemacs

Rewrite of the switch to develop page, using in-page tabs to simplify the guide into the two different approaches.

Hacking on Spacemacs

Added key bindings to refactor namespace forms in clojure-mode

"ran" 'clojure-insert-ns-form "raN" 'clojure-insert-ns-form-at-point "rsn" 'clojure-sort-ns

Updated practicalli/.spacemacs.d repository with doom modeline configuration, providing a very clean and simple UI experience for Emacs whilst still providing the most useful information.

July 16-31

Started series called Banking on Clojure to cover application servers, sql and relational databases. This will cover the full development and deployment workflow, including clojure.spec for specifications and generative testing.

Added more tools to practicalli/clojure-deps-edn

Add anchors to all sub-headings across all books, making content easier to navigate by enabling navigation to specific sections in a page. This helps keep relevant information together on one page and reference a specific section from other pages.

Practicalli Clojure WebApp

Started a section on Application servers, covering approaches to server configuration and server start/stop/reload.

Started a section on Databases that will initially cover H2 and Postgresql relational databases, using Sql with next.jdbc

Created Banking on Clojure WebApp content for the live broadcasts and book. The project uses CircleCI for continuous integration and Heroku pipelines for deployment to staging and production.

Practicalli Clojure

Configure REPL startup using dev/user.clj file and :dev alias in practicalli/clojure-deps-edn configuration. Added examples of requiring namespaces and starting component lifecycle services at REPL startup added to Practicalli Clojure book.

Add section on data browser tools, extending REBL and Clojure Inspector with new projects Reveal and Portal.

practicalli/clojure-deps-edn

Identified main purpose of the practicalli/clojure-deps-edn project, to provide a large set of meaningful and consistently named aliases that would be available in all projects and less likely to be over-ridden by project specific deps.edn configuration.

Any experimental or alpha state tools are clearly marked as ‘experimental - used at own risk’ to set clear expectations.

Updated libraries used in aliases are using their fully qualified names, e.g. cider/cider-nrepl as this will be required for future versions of the Clojure CLI tool.

Added Google Storage mirrors for Maven Central for Americas, Asia and Europe to library repository configuration. Also added a community mirror in Asia (China) for Clojars.

Recent alias additions include

Practicalli Spacemacs

Add Emacs profiler use to the Spacemacs troubleshooting guide

Pull requests

Re-frame

Most of the Clojurists Together work was completed in the first sprint earlier in the year in May.

However we have released a stable v1.0.0 version of re-frame which is major milestone in the project’s history.

Also, many improvements to the docs have been made recently. Too many to mention but some are notable:

Also:

Numerically, we’re at 16 issues and 4 pull requests.