I ran into an issue at work earlier this week. I needed to include a phone number validation library in the Clojurescript side. It was libphonenumber by Google, which meant it was compiled with the Google closure library. Great! That gets us halfway there. That classifies it as a third party library, meaning in lein-cljsbuild you would specify it under the :libs key instead of the :preamble, :externs, or :foreign-libs. I just want to make it clear that the :foreign-libs option is used for non Google closure code like jquery. Read more...

A neat trick I learned a few months back is that you can reset all of your Clojure namespaces in the repl you're working on if you're using Emacs + Cider. Just use M-x cider-refresh. That command 'refreshes' your repl by undefining the vars and reloading them. This way, if you have run-away code in your repl state, you can refresh it without doing a cider-restart. This comes in handy especially when you're writing tests with clojure. Read more...

I'm a Ruby, Clojure, and now Node.js developer. When I was doing Clojure, I had a REPL driven development style. Those of you that don't know what a REPL is, it's a read-eval-print-loop. You've probably used a REPL before and didn't even know it. The interactive ruby shell, otherwise known as IRB is the default REPL that ships with Ruby. It's also the same REPL you get when you run rails console. Read more...