Spawn

Warning: Spawn is still a work in progress and is not yet ready for public consumption.

Spawn is a leiningen plugin that makes it easy to get up and running with various types of Clojure projects. It supports automated project and code generation, similar to the scaffolding and project generation features found in Rails.

It has two primary goals:

To provide templated projects as a learning tool for Clojure newbies, allowing them to start building applications (such as web apps) right away. Figuring out how to assemble the relevant components can be a daunting task for someone lacking prior Clojure experience.
To save time for experienced Clojure users, allowing them to stub out common application types in seconds instead of having to tediously build out the same infrastructure every time.

Getting Started

Install Leiningen
Install the Spawn plugin by typing lein plugin install spawn 0.1.0 at a command prompt. (NOTE: This will not work until spawn is mature enough for release and has been pushed to Clojars. If you're interested in trying out Spawn in the meantime, just clone this repository and run lein install first.

Creating a Web Application

At the commandline, type lein spawn webapp <name>, substituting a name of your choice. This will create a new directory at your current location.
Switch to the directory that was just created, and type lein run
That's it! You've successfully created a web application and started a server. You can visit localhost:8080 in your browser to check it out.

Generating a Controller

Create a webapp using spawn.
At the commandline, in the root folder for the webapp, run lein spawn controller <name>.
That's it! You can try out your new controller by visiting localhost:8080//. You can see your new controller in the src/.../controllers directory, and you can look at how it's routes are wired into the webapp in src/.../server.clj

Note: In order to modify your server.clj file and add the new route, Spawn searches for certain strings so it knows where to insert the new code. If you modify server.clj, Spawn might not be able wire in the new controller. In this case, you'll either have to revert your server.clj file to a form that Spawn can handle, or add the new controller by hand.

Extensions

Spawn is highly extensible, making it easy to write additional templates or recipes, called "genomes."

To create a Spawn genome, just create a normal Clojure source file to the src path, for example, /leiningen/spawn/genome/mygenome.clj. This file should contain a public function of the same name as the file's namespace. e.g, mygenome. Like leiningen plugins, if the first parameter to the genome function is called 'project', a leiningen project will be passed in if lein is invoked from within a leiningen project folder.

Then, after rebuilding the Spawn plugin, you can invoke your function from the command line using lein spawn: for example, lein spawn mygenome. Any additional arguments after the genome name will be passed as arguments to the genome's clojure function.

See the webapp genome for an example of some of the utilities Spawn provides for generating directory structures and rendering templates using the StringTemplate library.

TODO

Immediate needs before public release:

Implement a genome for view generation within a webapp (using Enlive)
Make more newbie-friendly by providing helpful guidance on errors instead of stack traces.
Provide a mechanism for introspecting and listing the available genomes, along with documentation

Nice-to-haves:

Implement a genome for middleware generation within a webapp
Implement a genome for RESTful resource generation within a webapp
Implement a genome for generating an Enlive view
Implement a a genome for generating a Hiccup view
Enable war compilation for the generated webapp
Make it possible to create and install genomes without recompiling and redistributing Spawn

redinger / spawn