Episode 11 with Jim Crossley and Toby Crawley: the Immutant two-step

Toby Crawley (@tcrawley) and Jim Crossley (@jcrossley3) (shown to the left, respectively), among other things, are the primary instigators behind Immutant, the Clojure application platform built on top of the JBoss Application Server.  The tl;dr on Immutant is that it provides many of the same infrastructure services that many “platforms” provide (e.g. clustered queuing, caching, […]

Toby Crawley (@tcrawley) and Jim Crossley (@jcrossley3) (shown to the left, respectively), among other things, are the primary instigators behind Immutant, the Clojure application platform built on top of the JBoss Application Server.  The tl;dr on Immutant is that it provides many of the same infrastructure services that many “platforms” provide (e.g. clustered queuing, caching, distributed transactions, etc), but with a single set of well-integrated Clojure APIs that you can (relatively) easily deploy and manage on your own infrastructure.

Further, regardless of the project, Toby and Jim are always good company; it was a hoot to hang out with them for a spell! We had a great time, I hope you enjoy listening in…

(Recorded on November 16th, 2013; my apologies to Jim and Toby for the particularly bad latency on the release of the recording.)

Listen:

Or, download the mp3 directly.

(Remember to follow @MostlyLazy so you know who’s going to be on next, and can send us topics and questions!)

All about Immutant…

(…which Chas happens to use as a foundation for Docuharvest, yet another of his side projects)

“Platform as a service” services, e.g. Heroku & Elastic Beanstalk
Grizzly, a Java-based HTTP server designed to be embeddable (much like Jetty), which happens to be used as the basis for Glassfish’s web stack
Using nREPL and all the middleware available for it (like Piggieback via Austin for ClojureScript REPL-ing) in conjunction with Immutant
clojurescript.test, a maximal port of clojure.test to ClojureScript
double-check, a fork of Reid Draper’s simple-check property/specification testing library that can be used portably in both Clojure and ClojureScript
Plans for Immutant 2.0, a.k.a. “The Deuce”
The Immutant mascot (inspired by the Hypnotoad), probably the best thing to ever come out of a JIRA ticket:


TorqueBox, the Ruby application platform built on top of JBoss, analogous to Immutant
Chas’ various Immutant hacks around programmatic queue and logging configuration (the former of which is apparently slated for addition to the official API in some form)
Infinispan (JBoss’ distributed in-memory key-value store) & Hotrod (its wire protocol for un-clustered client communication)
Shout-out to Bob McWhirter, founder of the ProjectOdd group at Red Hat (which houses Immutant, Torquebox, and others)
Caribou, a “dynamic web application generator with antlers”, one of the latest entries in the Clojure web framework explosion
Clojure Conj 2013 “recap”
vert.x, an “asynchronous polyglot application platform for the JVM”, and the Clojure vert.x support, which Toby wrote/maintains and talked about in his Conj talk
Recent fixes to Clojure (which landed in 1.6.0 alphas) to prevent memory leaks in dynamically-deployed applications
/ht Andy Fingerhut and Alex Miller for their recent contributions to the Clojure development process, etc.
ClojureScript releases are versioned in an “interesting” way, e.g. 0.0-XXXX instead of X.Y.Z. Toby asks, “Why, why, why‽”.

The mentioned mailing list post where this versioning scheme originally arose is here, and the ongoing documentation of it looks to be here.

Results from the 2013 State of Clojure and ClojureScript
Michael Fogus’ post and talk about the ClojureScript compiler pipeline
cljx, an implementation of “feature expressions”, enabling one to target both Clojure and ClojureScript from a single codebase
Not much of a news flash, but Mac OS X is no longer a reasonable option for (some, many?) software developers. What follows is some navel-gazing on our collective migration to Linux.
Powercenter 120, the first computer that Chas bought new
Russ Olsen’s “To the Moon” Conj 2013 talk

P.S.

Just prior to finishing these show notes, I asked Jim and Toby what pictures of themselves they wanted to go along with the episode. Their (mostly) prosaic, perfectly-fine twitter avatar headshots came first, but then Jim was kind enough to direct my attention to this gem:

Yes, that’s a kitten t-shirt / patriotic fanny pack ensemble. Don’t mind the haters, Toby, this is why we love you.

…