Idea for a Clojure project:

[Luke VanderHart]

I do really like Mike's parentscript idea, by the way, but I thought
I'd throw this out there as well just for discussion.

What about an open-source, hostable implementation of the
functionality of Yahoo Pipes? (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/). It is
the first and only application I've found where "web 2.0" can even
begin to approach the visionary way people describe the concept of
"mashups". But right now, Yahoo is the only game in town, and it's
closed source, closed-hosting and limited-volume, meaning it's not
particularly useful other than for personal use or a toy.

What about creating a Clojure application that is embeddable on any
Java server that can provide this kind of functionality to transform,
process, combine & retransmit data?

This is less of a "clojure framework" kind of project than most of the
other suggestions, although it could definitely double as a more
generic Clojure data processing library. But it's primary value seems
to be that it would be a great evangelistic tool for Clojure - by
simply packaging it as a jar that can be thrown into any existing
webapp, it could allow Clojure to get a foot in the door in the heart
of the market I feel it would be ideal for.

I thought it might be good for our group for the following reasons:
1. It will scale well depending on how much work we want to put into
it. We could get a simple RSS aggregator working in a couple of hours,
and it's all incremental steps from there. If we put enough work into
it and it picks up community support, it could even turn into an
enterprise-level open-source tool.
2. The programming work is very parellelizable and atomic. After
writing a basic framework, the rest of the work involves writing short
and sweet filter, processor & converter components.
3. It involves a lot of different types of programming. Server
programming, data manipulation, web programming & gui programming (if
we wrote a standalone Swing app to configure pipelines). It's likely
that each of us will be very familiar with at least part of it's
application domain.
4. It plays to Clojure's strengths. The problem in question is very
well suited to functional programming & lazy sequences. Most of the
functionality is already built into Clojure in the form of the seq-
processing functions.

Anyway, it seems like a cool idea. I have no particular attachment to
it, in the sense that I'd be perfectly happy to do something else,
also, but this is something that I'd love to work on someday. I'd do
it myself if I didn't already have a side project.

[Michael Harrison (goodmike)]

I second this suggestion, Luke. I think a pipes-like application would
be a great project for the very reasons you cite.

I'll buy a beer for the person who comes up with the best Clojure pun
name for this.

Anyone else want to suggest a capstone project?

Michael

[Keith Bennett]

Michael -

Bongs? ;)

- Keith

[Luke VanderHart]

Great... I'll come to the next meeting prepared to talk about it.
(When is that, by the way? I seem to have forgotten. April 4?)

Here's a crazy thought... is it not possible to conceive of every data-
driven website as being driven by a pipes-like system, if you extend
the notion of possible "inputs" to thinks like database access, and
possible "outputs" to any given page design?

> Bongs? ;)

"What do you work on?"
"Bongs"

yeah... :p


On Mar 26, 6:00 pm, "Michael Harrison (goodmike)"

[Michael Harrison (goodmike)]

I call dibs on writing the huff function.

mh

On Mar 27, 12:00 pm, Luke VanderHart <luke.vanderh...@gmail.com>

[Keith Bennett]

Luke -

Sounds good. You make a strong case for it.

I have a lot of Swing experience, and in principle would like to help
out with the Swing part, but the app you describe is an ambitious
project that could take a lot of time, and there are other
technologies I would prefer to invest that kind of time in. I'd be
willing to work on a (much) more modest Swing app, though, assuming my
time availability doesn't change.

And, of course, I'd like to work on the non-Swing parts too.

- Keith

On Mar 17, 1:48 pm, Luke VanderHart <luke.vanderh...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Michael Harrison (goodmike)]

Luke,

Thank you for volunteering to talk about a Clojure Pipes project. I
think we're all looking forward to learning more about it.

The next meeting is indeed April 4th at 1PM. Details about our next
meeting should always be available on the blog, http://clojurestudydc.wordpress.com/.
I think I'll put up something about your Pipes idea. Does "informal
presentation" sound good? If you need any help pulling material
together, let me know. I can look things up and read code for you to
save you time.

Cheers,
Michael


On Mar 27, 12:00 pm, Luke VanderHart <luke.vanderh...@gmail.com>

[Luke VanderHart]

Yeah... I think I'll just come prepared to demo Yahoo Pipes and sell
the idea of what I think we could do, along with some high-level
design, and see what people think. I don't think I'll actually write
any code at this stage. If we decide to do it, we can create a github/
sourceforge page, distribute some small tasks, and start cranking.

And Keith, don't worry. The beauty of this project is that we can do
as much or as little as we want. If everything else falls into place
we may eventually want a high-end, slick GUI, but we can definitely
have something useful without it or with something more basic.

See you all Saturday,
-Luke



On Mar 30, 4:13 pm, "Michael Harrison (goodmike)"

<goodmike...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Luke,
>
> Thank you for volunteering to talk about a Clojure Pipes project. I
> think we're all looking forward to learning more about it.
>
> The next meeting is indeed April 4th at 1PM. Details about our next

> meeting should always be available on the blog,http://clojurestudydc.wordpress.com/.