

Pedestal – An open source tool set for building web applications in Clojure - VaedaStrike
http://pedestal.io/

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eggsby
Pedestal is still very alpha and I'm not sure that I would use it for any of
my projects... yet.

For instance, using the example apps provided I couldn't get the chat
application to work properly -- if I opened up two windows to the app, only
one of them would work at any given moment.

I wonder at the real use case for this style of application, the included
hello world app was almost 2 megs of javascript resources (this was without
minification or advanced google closure compilation) it seems excessive for a
small 'your page updates when server sent changes happen', and certainly more
expensive than the approach taken by projects like meteor for similar
functionality.

I think some of the features it offers are a glimpse into the future, tracking
the state changes from one moment to a next rather than firing off and
forgetting about events, almost like version control for your clientside
state. This sounds incredibly useful, but for what I'm not quite sure. What
sort of apps need that sort of functionality to the point where the extra
ceremony required becomes justified?

Another interesting concept is that it is theoretically possible to shift the
generation of the app tree deltas to the server and turn the clientside into
nothing but a dumb renderer. The thinner the renderer the easier it becomes to
target alternate graphical environments.

I know the guys at relevance have hinted about the above, it'd certainly be
interesting to see.

Definitely a project to watch :)

~~~
asmala
While I agree with most of what you're saying, the 2Mb JS file is entirely
expected behavior if you don't use advanced compilation, which eliminates
unused JS code and would hence cut down the file size to a fraction of what
you see.

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ajsharp
A tool for building "web applications" seems a little far-fetched, given the
values and conceptual model pedastal is based on. On services and
scalability...

> Built with scalability up front rather than an afterthought

And

> Pedestal gives developers a solid foundation to build highly scalable
> _backend services_ [emphasis mine]

Pedastal seems more like a framework for building enterprise services, not
simply "web applications". It's serving a type of use case, for sure. Just not
one suited for all web applications.

If you're a pre-product-market-fit startup, trying to validate a concept,
pedastal isn't for you. But, if you're square, or linkedin, or [insert
successful startup here] and you're going to introduce a new service into your
existing infrastructure, yea, it should be performant, and then maybe pedastal
and the mental model that backs it makes sense.

But for an early stage startup, you're not likely to have to solve many of
these problems, especially the scaling ones. And doing SOA from the get-go is
__orders of magnitude __more complex than the standard monolithic application.
You won't reap any of the benefits from SOA until you have the requirement for
some form of scale -- either team scale or product performance scale. The more
likely case for an early-stage startup taking the approach pedastal is
"peddling" (forgive me, I had to) is that your application architecture will
be significantly more complex, making it harder to work on, grow, and hire
for.

The stuff pedastal is trying to do is for grown-ups, and grown up
applications. And in this metaphor, early-stage startups are teenagers.

How this looks to me is that relevance has a specific perspective on how to
build services. I'd guess that perspective is highly informed on the types of
clients they work with. Given the mental model of pedastal, I'd also venture
to guess that they don't do much work with early-stage startups. Excuse my
presumptiveness on the nature of Relevance's business, but if a consulting
shop tried to sell this bill of goods to my early-stage company, I'd probably
sound the architecture astronaut alarm and show them the door.

~~~
asmala
Hmm, I wonder though, is this any more complex than a client plus server combo
of MVC frameworks like, say, Ember and Rails? It certainly took me a while to
wrap my head around how Pedestal apps are structured but once I managed to do
that, the jump didn't seem much different than the one it took me to move from
ad hoc PHP to MVC in Rails back in 2007.

That being said, Pedestal's sweet spot definitely doesn't seem to be simple
interactivity sugar a là jQuery, but I would by no means say it's not suited
for startups. Scalability just happens to be one of the benefits of the
architecture they chose.

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DennisP
It's going to make me sad if the leading Clojure web tools end up integrated
with a proprietary database.

~~~
rkneufeld
Pedestal ships with absolutely zero dependence on Datomic, and we intend to
keep it that way. Datomic is a fantastic tool, but even we understand that it
might not always be the right tool for the job. As such, we've built Pedestal
with little to no opinion on backing store.

\- Ryan @ Relevance

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fogus
What's with the back-handed thread title? Lame.

~~~
tadfisher
> Simple means planning for architectural needs from the ground up. Simple
> means decoupling your service layers into individual pieces that flow
> together instead of a single monolithic codebase. Simple is _difficult_.

~~~
fogus
When I read the quote from the Pedestal site, it echoes to me similar quotes:

    
    
        “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
    

or

    
    
        “Any darn fool can make something complex; 
        it takes a genius to make something simple.” 
    

or

    
    
        “Every solution to every problem is simple. 
        It's the distance between the two where the 
        mystery lies.” 
    

or

    
    
        “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious 
        and adding the meaningful.”
    

or

    
    
        “Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.” 
    

or maybe even

    
    
        “I would have written a shorter letter, but I 
        did not have the time.”
    

When I read the title of this thread I see none of these.

 _note: the title is now fixed, but I'll keep these quotes here_

~~~
VaedaStrike
I. screwed. up. You have an excellent point.

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nightwolf
Really liking the website!

