Inspired by the developer experience of the Play framework as well as that of Django and Ruby on Rails I’ve been giving some thought to what a “batteries included” experience might be for Clojure web development. Unlike things like Pedestal which focuses on trying to keep LISPers happy and writing LISP as much as possible I’m approaching this from the point of view of what would be attractive to frontend developers who choose between things like Rails, Sinatra or Express.

First lets focus on what we already have. Leiningen 2 gives us the ability to create application templates that define the necessary dependencies and directory structures as well as providing an excellent REPL. This should allow us to build a suitable application with a single command. The Compojure plugin already does a lot of the setup necessary to quickstart an application. It downloads dependencies and fires up a server that auto-reloads as the application changes.

The big gap though is that the plugin creates a very bare bones application structure, useful for generating text on the web but not much else. To be able to create a basic (but conventional) web app I think we need to have some standard things like a templating system that works with conventional HTML templates and support for generating and consuming JSON.

Based on my experience and people’s feedback I think it would be worth basing our package on the Mustache templating language via Clostache and using Cheshire to generate and parse the JSON (I like core.data’s lack of dependencies but this is web programming for hackers so we should favour what hackers want to use).

I also think we need to set up some basic static resources within the app like Modernizr and jQuery. A simple, plain skin might also be a good idea unless we can offer a few variations within the plugin such as Bootstrap and Foundation which would be even better.

Supporting a datastore is probably too hard at the moment due to the lack of consensus about what a good allround database is. However I think it would be sensible to offer some instructions as to how to back the app with Postgres, Redis and MongoDB.

I would include Friend by default to make authentication easy and because its difficult to to do that much interesting stuff without introducing some concept of a user. However I think it is important that by default the stack is essentially stateless so authentication needs to be cookie-based by default with an easy way of switching between persistence schemes such as memory and memcache.

Since webapps often spend a lot of time consuming other web services I would include clj-http by default as well. Simple caching that can be backed by memcache also seems important since wrapping Spymemcache is painful and the current Clojure wrappers over it don’t seem to work well with the environment constraints of cloud platforms like Heroku.

A more difficult requirement would be asset pipelining. I think by default the application should be capable of compiling and serving LESS and Coffeescript, with reloading, for development purposes. However ideally during deployment we want to extract all our static resources and output the final compiled versions for serving out of a static handler or alternatively a static resource host. I hate asset fingerprinting due to the ugliness it introduces into urls, I would prefer an ETag solution but fingerprinting is going to work with everything under the sun. I think it should be the default with an option to use ETags as an alternative.

If there was a lein plugin that allowed me to create an application like this with one command I would say that we’re starting to have a credible web development platform.