A Web Non-Framework

webnf aims to give you a full web stack, while getting out of the way and out of your repl. It assumes that you know your way around clojure and gives you:

• Meta dependencies with lots of popular libraries to just use it (tm) and worry about minimal dependency sets before packaging
• Lots of missing bits and pieces, some of this should be patches to various projects and will be deprecated if they are incorporated
• An AsyncServlet working in every Servlet 3.0 container, for long-polling and streaming
• A jetty runner utilizing servlet infrastructure to do:
  • virtual hosting
  • detailed request logging
  • classloader per webapp
  • calling out via fcgi e.g. to php
• A ClojureScript port of enlive

This started as one developer's library code shared between various web projects and then grew some architectural spines in the form of the vhosting servlet runner.

Dependency curation

Webnf maintains a couplpe of dependency-only projects, that aim to fulfill a role similar to how the old clojure-contrib project was used:

To get a set of workable state-of-the-art dependencies fast.

Since old clojure-contrib wasn't actually meant for that task, but as an umbrella to distribute code with a license compatible to clojure, there was a shift towards new contrib. People learned to use github and clojars to share code.

webnf.deps aims to provide some of that "start project once" feel, but also to establish a canon of libraries.

Guiding principles

• webnf.deps aims to provide the working set that's there for you to require.

• The primary focus is generally applicable libraries.

  • Algorithms
  • Data Formats (parsers, emitters, algo impls on them)
  • very popular web APIs
  • tools that don't require any setup

• When two dependencies provide similar functionality, only one should be included.

  • The pure clojure version wins.
  • Overlapping concerns between libaries are permitted, if they share data formats.

• Licensing in a dependency is a secondary consideration, but you should be free to use and modify it.

Help wanted

We are looking for code that should be useful to most clojure coders, especially when working on web apps.

Will it ever be done?

There are two important milestones, before webnf should be considered near 1.0:

1. There needs to be a leiningen plugin for the jetty server itself and for projects to run on it. Maybe we can take a page out of immutant's book.

2. A way to undeploy a webapp and free all of its permgen. This is kind of a long shot and not directly related to webnf, but it's crucial in order to make hosting on a shared JVM solid. One developer has plans to use the debugging APIs to find all objects keeping a classloader alive.

F.A.Q

Why not Immutant?

It happens that one developer was very comfortable with jetty and didn't want any EE. This only affects webnf/server. async-servlet and the other stuff should be fine in immutant or any modern servlet container, really.

Why not Ring?

Actually Ring. Plus lots of tidbits, that don't fit into ring's scope and some that might.

Why not Pedestal?

async-servlet keeps true to the original ring lifecycle and just allowing you to extend it past the return in a way closely modelled onto servlet 3.0

It is done in a way that allows you to utilize middlewares if they only care about status and headers (since you just return a special response body to start async)