lfecljapp

LFE-Clojure (JVM) Interop using JInterface

Introduction

This project is a port of Maxim Molchanov's example Erlang + Clojure interop project (via JInterface). Only minor changes were made to the Clojure code. The Erlang code was completely replaced with LFE.

This project demonstrates how one can:

Create a Clojure project which utilizes Erlang JInterface to communicate with LFE nodes,
Start a supervised Clojure node in LFE,
Send a message to Clojure nodes from LFE, and
Receive responses from the Clojure nodes in LFE.

Dependencies

LFE Side of the House

Erlang
lfetool + rebar

Clojure Side of the House

Java
lein

Building

To get started, build the Clojure Uberjar for cljnode and compile the Erlang source files:

$ make compile

Running

Once everything has compiled successfully, you can start an Erlang shell and then bring the app up:

$ make repl

(lfenode@cahwsx01)> (lfeclj-app:start)
ok

Alternatively, you can use the dev make target which will start the lfecljapp for you automatically:

$ make dev

Once the app has started, you will see output like the following (elided):

(lfenode@cahwsx01)>
14:03:52.849 [info] Application lager started on node lfenode@cahwsx01
14:03:52.855 [info] Starting clojure app with cmd: "java ..."

At this point, you are in the shell, and before too long you should also see a log message display showing the successful start of the Clojure node:

14:03:52.856 [info] Application lfecljapp started on node lfenode@cahwsx01
14:03:55.898 [info] Connection to java node established, pid: <11113.1.0>

Using

Now that you've got both ends of the connection up, you can take it for a spin with a ping command:

(lfenode@cahwsx01)> (lfecljapp:ping "clj-node@cahwsx01" "clj-mbox")
#(ping <0.83.0>)

The node name used in the example above was taken from the output when the Clojure node was started up. In particular, look for the line beginning with INFO: Starting clojure app ... and the value associated with the -Dnode parameter. That's your destination node in this case.

To see the response from the Clojure node, you'll need to flush the shell, since the Clojure port sends its responses to the caller, and in this case the caller is the LFE REPL:

(lfenode@cahwsx01)> (c:flush)
Shell got {pong,<11113.1.0>}
ok

Hurray! A successful response from the Clojure node!

Fun for the Future

Here are some things I'd like to play with in this project:

Setting up some example long-running computations in Clojure.
Spawn multiple nodes and distribute computations across an LFE cluster.
Use lfecljapp as a proxy to a Storm cluster, and explores ways in which it might be useful to interact with Storm from LFE.

oubiwann / lfecljapp