An Architect's View

The slides and code for my first presentation at cf.Objective() 2013 are now online - Polyglot Lessons to Improve Your CFML:

• Learn You a What for Great Good slides (PDF)
• Learn You a What for Great Good code (Github)

The other presentations will be posted after I've given them and the code will appear in that Github repository.

A month ago I posted that java.jdbc 0.3.0 alpha 1 was available for testing and since then I've made a few more alpha releases as the API and code settles down so I figured it was time to blog about the recent changes.

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Other than noting back in January that all three(!) of my talk proposals were accepted, I haven't blogged about them since, so the only information about them is on the cf.Objective() web site. The session overviews give a fair sense of what you should get out of each presentation and roughly what they'll cover.

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Exposing Clojure function calls in New Relic web transaction traces requires adding Java-style annotations: @Trace. Here we show how to transform your existing Clojure code to a form that has annotated methods which show up in New Relic!

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A question was recently asked on the Clojure Users group on LinkedIn about reasons to migrate to Clojure for enterprise applications in a Java shop. It's a fairly typical question from people in the Java world when they hear the buzz about Clojure, and of course asking the question on a Clojure group garnered a lot of positive responses about why Clojure is a good choice. I didn't feel anyone had really addressed a core aspect of the original question which was, essentially, "Why should I, as a Java web developer, using JPA, JSF etc, choose Clojure instead for an enterprise application?". The key considerations here are "enterprise application" and "Java web devloper, using JPA, JSF etc". Clojure is rightly praised for big data projects, simplified concurrency due to immutable data, and the conciseness of its solutions. The general advice when introducing Clojure to an organization is to take a grass roots approach: use it for some tooling first, or a small low-risk (but perhaps high-profile) project and show how well it works in a Java-dominated world. Then you get more and more developers trying it out and gradually the organization adopts it for more and more projects. It's good advice, and it's often how Clojure has crept into Java shops so far (as opposed to those fast-moving small shops that already have a tendency toward polyglot development).

I didn't feel anyone had really talked about how radical Clojure seems to a conservative "enterprise" company that's already bought into the Java way of doing things from top-to-bottom (as indicated by the original poster's references to JPA and JSF). I've had a couple of people ask me to turn my (fairly length) response on the group into a blog post, so here it is...

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0.3.0 represents a major overhaul of the clojure.java.jdbc API. Read on to find out what has changed!

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To make it easier to manage collaboration on FW/1-related projects in future, several projects have now moved under a new FW/1 - Framework One - organization on Github. Your forks and watches should have been updated but if you have local clones of the old repos under my personal Github account, you'll want to update those. Here's the full list of Framework One projects:

• FW/1 - Framework One - simple MVC for CFML
• DI/1 - Inject One - simple Dependency Injection for CFML
• cfmljure - the magic bridge between CFML and Clojure
• FW/1 - Framework One - simple MVC for Clojure
• Leiningen project template for FW/1 - Framework One - for Clojure

If you were a collaborator on one of these projects before, you will no longer have commit access (because you were a collaborator directly on my repo). If you'd like to become a collaborating team member on one of these projects as part of the new organization, contact me directly to discuss that. I'd certainly like to see some of the regular contributors in the past become official "Team Framework One" members in the new organization!

Thank you to all the contributors who've helped get these projects to where they are now!

CongoMongo (on Github) has just received a small update today, adding a few more advanced features:

• read preference supported (per-connection, per-collection, per-fetch) - Niclas Meier
• add-index! supports :background true/false - dwwoelfel
• namespaced keyword keys in maps are roundtripped correctly - Adam Clements

See also CongoMongo on clojars.

It had been a while since the last release of clj-time (on Github) (July 2012) so I figured it was about time to have an update, to officially release the features that community members have been adding:

• Add testing predicates for days (e.g., tuesday?) and months (e.g., july?) - Devin Walters
• Change base Clojure version from 1.3.0 to 1.4.0 (we're testing against 1.3.0 and 1.5.1 now)
• format-local-time now returns nil on a bad format string (instead of silently returning the current time!) - mw10013
• date-midnight is now supported across all the coercions - Nick Barnwell, with a fix from Tom McNulty
• Correct parse-local behavior when no format is given - Ben Poweski
• Added MIT-LICENSE.txt - thank you David Powell for the nudge!
• Add support for Joda's YearMonth - Ragnard Dahlén
• Add instant->map producing readable Clojure-format date/time, interval and period values - Thiago Nunes

I'd also like to give a special shout out to Michael Klishin for attention to the documentation and for review and input on some of these features!

See also clj-time on clojars.

[UPDATED] Welcome to 2013 and at World Singles we are expanding our development team! We're looking for self-motivated people in two very different roles, working remotely from their home office.

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