Some feedback on project types within Netbeans

[Eric Thorsen]

I'm thinking about abandoning the notion of Clojure projects and
working all from a base of the existing Java project support. You
would simply use the Java projects as a starting point and be able to
'Add Clojure Support' to your Java Projects. From there we can work
primarily with the template system within Netbeans to provide
templates for various other scenarios such as using Compojure in a web
project, having a gen-class template where you can select the base
class and/or interfaces and have the system generate a skeleton, etc.
I will probably leave the existing Clojure project since it is a
simple way for someone to build a Hello World app to allow people new
to Clojure to get started right away.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Eric

[Mark Engelberg]

I think I can best express my thoughts by first explaining my Clojure
workflow in Emacs.

On my computer, I have a directory c:\devel\clojure. In this file, I
put all my clojure files.

Let's say I want to write a banking simulation. I might start by
creating a file called banking.clj in emacs. Initially, I don't
declare any sort of namespace at the top of the file. I just start
adding functions, and hitting Ctrl-C Ctrl-K to load the file into the
REPL. I play around in the REPL. Eventually, when I feel I've got
something reusable and worthy of being required from other files, I go
ahead and add a namespace (which must match the file so that it can be
found by the "require" statement of other files). Then, if I want to
test it further in the REPL, not only do I have to hit Ctrl-C Ctrl-K,
but I also have to type (in-ns 'banking)

Anyway, as long as I keep everything in one directory, and make the
namespaces match the filename, everything pretty much works as I
expect it to. Sometimes I effectively make a "project" by putting
related files in a subdirectory off my devel\clojure directory, but
then I have to change all the namespaces to match the subdirectory.
For example, if I end up with two banking-related files (say debit.clj
and credit.clj) in a banking subdirectory, then the namespaces must be
banking.debit and banking.credit. I must say I find this redundancy
between filenames and namespaces annoying, and it makes it difficult
to rename files or move them around, or rename the directories they
are in, but as long as I keep things consistent, it all works.

The one time I tried to do AOT-compilation of Clojure code using my
Emacs/directory-based organization, it was a total pain to get
everything set up so that it would compile it to a location where the
other files could see it. Blech. My guess is that Enclojure improves
upon this considerably, but this isn't my main use case for Clojure.

Although my Emacs setup works, there are a lot of things I don't like
about it. So I'm looking forward to trying out Enclojure.

But I'm coming at this from a perspective of not having used Netbeans
before. So when I start up Netbeans I have to understand what a
project is, and what it means to have all the files in one project,
and how that interacts with Clojure's concept of namespaces. I was a
little surprised when the skeleton project created a stub gen-class
with a main. On the one hand, it makes me feel that building a
"compiled project" in Enclojure is probably easier than what I've
dealt with before, but on the other hand, it leaves me unsure how to
do the quick file-editing-executing-in-REPL I'm used to doing. I'll
figure it out eventually, but for now, I'm still a bit confused.

When you say you're moving towards a "Java project only" concept, my
initial reaction is that it sounds like you're going to focus even
more on users who need to intermingle Java and Clojure code, and that
maybe I'm going to need an even deeper understanding of
projects/classpaths/Java organization to get anything done in
Enclojure. And I personally am more interested in using Enclojure to
work almost exclusively with Clojure code and very rarely with Java.
But if the choice of "project" really has no bearing on these issues,
then I don't really care.

[Andreas Wenger]

Sounds good, this is also the way the Eclipse plugin (ccw) does it.
For me this is ideal, since I'm sure I will have Java code in my
projects and not just Clojure.

[Eric Thorsen]

You use case is one I've heard before particularly the notion of
having a scratchpad for doing work you are not committed to yet or at
least have not fully flushed out where things belong (namespaces).
The Enclojure Clojure project template is intended to get someone up
and running immediately with an AOT project.
Creating a project in Enclojure and adding files does help
considerably (IMHO) with keeping things in line with compilation and
code loading within the Clojure model. I tend to create a file within
the project I'm using in a namespace and use that as a scratchpad. I
do the refactoring by hand (not unlike what you are describing above)
and this should be automated. It's on the list of things to do in
Enclojure :)
What I'm thinking about with the Java projects with "Adding Clojure
Support" should not require you to understand anything about
intermingling code at all. What I'm attempting to do is _not_
reinvent all the good work done for supporting app servers and the
like which I _should_ be able to piggy back on.
That being said, one main issue for me in making this work is ensuring
the compilation of Clojure and Java code can be done seamlessly for
the developer which means I have to be able to participate in the
build process of these projects which I'm hoping will be easy for me
to do...

Thanks for the detailed description!
Eric

[Chas Emerick]

I'm afraid we've never used the clojure-specific project type, though
that's more because I never took the time to figure out what the
difference was between a j2se project and a clojure project. If it
matters, we always have a 5-10% seasoning of Java code in our
otherwise all-clojure projects, and we have our own set of clojure
compilation targets in base ant includes. It would be nice if the
latter could go away, but they work too well to go shopping right
now. :-)

- Chas

[cej38]

I would like to have a clojure specific project type. I know very
little Java. Having everything set up in a more Java centric
environment sounds like more complication than I want.