Dashboard, part 2

After a break for more important projects, I'm back on the dashboard project. Since the first version was working fine, I decided to redo everything, according to a well-known principle in application development...

I replaced vanilla JavaScript by ClojureScript, and Ajax calls on Compojure routes (to retrieve data) by core.async on a websocket.

I had previously used on another project websockets with httpkit and webbitserver. It was working on two different ports, and management (and building) of websocket brought a lot of boilerplate.

It was also necessary to convert data to json with cheshire on the server side and Javascript functions on the front side.

For websockets I started using sente, which seemed to meet my needs perfectly. This library is from the same author than the excellent logging library timbre. Alas, a version conflicts and a recalcitrant macro prevented me from using it.

So I focused my attention on chord. Same core functionality than sente. The merge with the Compojure routes is done with the wrap-websocket-handler wrapper; the transit format is default, so everything is perfect.

There's no need anymore to worry about the onOpen, onClose and onMessage methods of the websocket, everything is automatic. It lets the user focus on data to transit the ws-channel, with core.async get and put. And of course all is done without having to explicitly convert the data to json.

On the front side, I use domina, which allows me to easily manipulate the elements of the page as well as events.