Have I mentioned I'm kinda late to this show? Well, better late than sorry. Anyway, I think you can't have too much of these, specially in times where google application engine (GAE) is growing and so is Clojure.
The scenario was like most others: I wanted to build my webapp using GAE and clojure, and also stay on the bleeding edge of each technology. So lets see what I've got. I started by taking a look at the "literature" available as blog posts and group discussions (such as this and this).
I installed lein, and created a standard project.clj (By force of habit, forgot to use "lein new", but it's practically the same). I added the following directives on defproject:
:source-path "src" :compile-path "war/WEB-INF/classes/" :library-path "war/WEB-INF/lib/" ;; namespaces will trigger AOT compilation to bytecode. you want this! :namespaces [ginasiosunderground.servlet]My goal is to produce a war directory, to upload to gae servers. So I told lein to compile to war/WEB-INF/classes, using war/WEB-INF/lib as a classpath dir. (More to come later on that :namespaces directory). The final project.clj is the following:
You can see the list of dependencies. I'm using the latest clojure 1.2, compojure 0.4, hiccup 0.2.4, a ring 0.2 (specifically adapted to use with gae servers) and appengine-clj (from r0man's fork). I also use clojure-json (to make my life easier on jQuery client side ajax calls). I'd like to mention the libraries from google. As of now, a default lein setup can't find those up to date versions (they are available, but I didn't want to toy around with maven repositories to make the magic happen). So I got those jars from the gae java sdk (download it from gae's site) and placed them on my war/WEB-INF/lib folder. Now be ware, you should have a copy of them somewhere else, because each lein clean you do will delete them from the lib directory! (eventually I'll get around to automate this process. I also know there's a "lein gae" plugin somewhere, but haven't tried yet, I'm not sure if it does what I want). One last thing about lein, you'll have to remove commons-fileupload-1.2.1.jar from your lib dir, otherwise gae will complain about it (it did, for me!).
Let's move on, then. my-app.servlet loads some stuff I need for the servlet, generates an HttpServlet class, and imports some classes so that I may load a jetty server and use gae's services (datastore, etc) in interactive mode (read, using SLIME with swank-clojure). Here's the namespace:
The magic that's left is, after issuing the defroutes and defservice command, the following (thanks to r0man for the tip!):
So here we are, running a webapp that can be deployed to gae (if you have read the linked posts, you'll see that you also need a web.xml and a appengine-web.xml to deploy, and you'll also need to comment out the ring.adapter.jetty from your namespace - gae already has its own application server :). Now by running the local server via (start-server) and not via gae's dev_appserver.sh shell script, you can happily work, on slime, redefine your servlet actions and refresh the browser to see your changes. Yay!
One problem, though. How do I use google's services? appengine-clj to the rescue, browse the code (see the test-suite for examples, specially on how you can test them locally using macros like appengine-clj.users/with-user-info). I was basically a happy camper until I got to try out user logins. GAE has this method, createLoginURL and createLogoutURL (applied to a UserService and a destination page string), that takes us to a dummy login screen. To be able to use this Service, I wrote the following code (loaded before starting the jetty server!):
But while this compiles perfectly, I noted that the login screen is not loaded, i.e., clicking the login link yields a 404 page. Not good. But it should be loadable, since the dev_server has it. Google's documentation isn't much help here, and I can't seem to find how on earth I access that screen (I need it to try out administration pages!). So feel free to drop a comment if you happen to know the solution for this!
To conclude, I'm not going to publish my application as a "blank example", as there are already some around. That said, if you have a question about this setup, just ask and I'll be as helpful as I can!
