New side project: I’m working on a new Web app with Datomic, Clojure, and HTMX. (Alongside my job search.)
I’m a little rusty with Clojure so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’m thinking maybe I’ll post some #devjournal toots along the way, just in case anyone’s interested.
@avi I’m starting with Ring for the Web server, because it’s what I’m familiar with and it still seems to be actively maintained and in use in the Clojure community. And it certainly seems perfectly sufficient and appropriate.
I’m curious if perhaps I might want to consider Pedestal at some point, but I’m resisting such thoughts for now, because right now Ring seems absolutely Good Enough. I’m not doing anything sophisticated with it anyway, so I’m guessing it’d be pretty straightforward to migrate to another “framework” at some later point.
I’m also not using Ring’s asynchronous support for now, because I’m not familiar with it, and it feels like it’d probably be a premature optimization. Right now I need to focus on the features and functionality of the app, and ignore any thoughts of performance or optimization. I hope that migrating to async down the road would also be fairly straightforward at some later point.
@avi I've never felt the need to use the async mode of Ring. We have a bunch of Ring/Jetty apps in production. Jetty's regular threading works fine without async mode -- and there's always the possibility of switching Jetty to vthreads these days.
@seancorfield super helpful, thanks!
I’m a little rusty with Java and Clojure, so: how robust/mature/compatible/viable are vthreads these days? Do they “just work” with Ring apps and Jetty? Are they sufficiently robust for production?
@avi That's a great question! We first tried them a few JDK versions ago and ran into some sort of deadlock issue, and several (Java) dependencies didn't seem to behave well with them, but as we've moved to newer JDKs and updated dependencies we've had better luck (we're on 24 in production). We haven't fully switched to vthreads in Jetty yet -- O/S threads are still serving us well for now, but I'll probably take a run at that once we move to JDK 25 (which will depend on New Relic adding support for it).
@seancorfield very interesting and informative! Thanks Sean!
