Clojure in Production

[Bruce Durling]

Fellow Clojurians,

As part of an irregular ongoing series I just thought I'd ask for everyone to shout out if they are using clojure professionally where they are. 

As always if you want to offer a job we have a separate list for that here:

http://groups.google.com/group/london-clojurian-jobs

At Mastodon C we're using a fair bit of clojure. We're building our clusters using pallet. The website is in compojure. I'm about to start using Liberator for the API. We do data analysis in cascalog. Our data visualisation is in nvd3 and google charts at the moment, but when I get the time I'm going to move them over to clojurescript.

So, who else is using clojure out there and if you are hiring then pop the job offer on the jobs list.

cheers,

Bruce

--
@otfrom | CTO & co-founder @MastodonC | mastodonc.com

[Henry Garner]

At Likely we've successfully made the leap from a mostly Ruby codebase to mostly Clojure over the last year. It's been a hugely valuable transition for us to make, and also enormous fun.

We're using cascalog on top of our Hadoop infrastructure, web applications written in compojure and stand-alone internal libraries. This is all in aid of the 'big data' collection and analysis that we're doing for our clients, which are a spread of organisations including the British Government, multinationals and small charities.

We're a technical team of 5 at the moment but we just raised a significant amount of cash to grow the team at all levels and specialisms including application development, data analysis, machine learning and operations. We've got several eminent Clojurians working with us already and if you're looking to join a great team – whether you're just starting out or an experienced hand – I'd love to hear from you.

Henry

CTO, Likely

he...@likely.co

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "London Clojurians" group.
To post to this group, send email to london-c...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to london-clojuri...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/london-clojurians?hl=en.

[mccraig mccraig]

at trampoline we use:

compojure : json api

clojureql + korma + qseq : smaller data

cascalog : bigger data analytics

clj-redis : caching

:c

--

[Steve Freeman]

On 21 Nov 2012, at 14:40, Henry Garner wrote:
> At Likely we've successfully made the leap from a mostly Ruby codebase to
> mostly Clojure over the last year. It's been a hugely valuable transition
> for us to make, and also enormous fun.

could you summarise the value (apart from the coolness :)?

S.

[Oliver Godby]

Hello All,

I'm not using Clojure in Production...yet.  I've started a new job recently as an Engineering Lead - for vivastreet.com - and one of the things that I am trying to do is sneak Clojure onto the stack.  I'm proposing that we build a unified Foundation API to de-couple the Database(s) from the web application, admin application, cron services etc.

As such I would love some "real-world" value stories from your good self, Henry and the experience at Likely - equally if anyone else can give me case-study type intelligence of how the businesses that they work / worked for gained / benefitted (beyond happy, geekgasming engineers), then that would be very helpful to me "winning", and once I win I might be able to make a case for hiring a fellow Clojurian or two... ;-)

Thanks All, see some of you at Thoughtworks on Tuesday!

Oli

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "London Clojurians" group.
To post to this group, send email to london-c...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to london-clojuri...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/london-clojurians?hl=en.

--
C. Oliver Godby
"Photographer, Geek; Dancer and Freak"
http://www.techno-mage.co.uk/
http://twitter.com/maleghast

"Work like you don't need the money.
 Love like you've never been hurt.
 Dance like there's nobody watching"

PA 09-10/12/2005

[Henry Garner]

could you summarise the value (apart from the coolness :)?

JVM access to some excellent Java libraries and Hadoop / HBase plus access to powerful data programming abstractions through Cascalog were part of the original decision to migrate away from ruby.

A side-effect (!) has been to realise the benefits of functional programming. It's a common story amongst the converted but it's been a pleasant revelation to me. We can do a lot more with less, so the code base of our internal web services can be understood very quickly in spite of the richness of the things they're doing. In a sense the responsibilities are horizontally distributed, and the language has promoted in us ways of composing small ideas into big features.

Add to that excellent support for concurrency and managing application state and it's been a joy to use.

It is also very cool. :)

H

[Paul Ingles]

Hi,

I'm sure some other folks from around uSwitch.com will chime anyway but
we're big fans.

For over 2 years we've been gradually rebuilding the products and services
from C# and .NET to a mixture of Ruby, Clojure, C etc.

Our Energy product was the first public facing service we publicly
deployed- if you've run a comparison (which you should definitely do ;) in
the last 18months or more you'll like have had your results served from a
Clojure service.

More teams are starting to use it too. Myself and some colleagues have been
using it to build some tools and services around a new data platform. Ryan
Greenhall et al have used Clojure to completely replace a horribly mutable
system that integrates us with energy suppliers. We're working on a
replacement Car Insurance system and I think the 2 guys have been also been
playing with writing the supplier integration system in Clojure.

Before uSwitch I'd written a few tools we had running in production that we
(Forward) used within our search business. They ran for a while have been
replaced a few times since then.

[Bruce Durling]

I'm wondering when some of our friends in Investment Banking will come out and 'fess up. ;-)

cheers,

Bruce

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "London Clojurians" group.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/london-clojurians/-/0lOjHJWcZqMJ.

To post to this group, send email to london-c...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to london-clojuri...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/london-clojurians?hl=en.

[Julian Birch]

C# and C++ here, so I'm afraid I'm remaining firmly in the closet.  I also use a relational database, which is as normative as it gets.

J

--
Sent from an iPhone, please excuse brevity and typos.

[Neale Swinnerton]

Investment banks invariably require high level mgr approval  before commenting on a public forum such as this list so the required 'fessing up' is not likely to be forthcoming and if it is won't be in any detail.

Conversations I've had this week with various recruiters tell me that many investment banks are considering clojure but leaning heavily towards scala because it's perceived as more of a java++ than a radical change.

Neale

{t: @sw1nn, w: sw1nn.com }

[Bruce Durling]

I've heard entirely unsubstantiated rumours that Deutsche Bank, Citi and UBS are all using it, but I couldn't possibly confirm it. ;-)

cheers,

Bruce

[Wille Faler]

We must listen to the same unreliable gossips, I've heard the same rumours.

/ Wille

[Wille Faler]

"A year of Clojure at a Bank": http://www.pitheringabout.com/?p=700 

[Bruce Durling]

Wille,

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Wille Faler <wille...@gmail.com> wrote:

We must listen to the same unreliable gossips, I've heard the same rumours.

 

You should be careful about what rumourmongers and gossips you listen to. ;-)

cheers,

Bruce

[Jon Pither]

Was just about to reply, there's some posts there about using clojure at a Swiss flavoured bank.

[Steve Freeman]

The UBS and Deutsche teams were both represented at EuroClojure

S

[Steve Freeman]

Very nice.

Thanks

S

[pseud...@me.com]

I know that Citigroup are using Clojure extensively in their Credit and Fixed Income technology businesses based out of London and New York. They claim it's the largest private sector deployment of Clojure to date. No idea how they're measuring that.

Martin

[Elie Labeca]

Still in relation to clojure in production. I'm introducing clojure in production, starting this week, for a major oil company (which I'm afraid I'm not at liberty of divulging), in a project involving the content migration of two massive websites.

A bit of a fluke I must admit, turned out the decision makers were happy to see a prototype written in 36 lines of clojure code *whilst* the planning meeting was taking place.

Also working on a separate clojure and clojurescript project, unrelated to the above, having to do with an entreprise grade PDF generation and design suite of tools to hit the cloud early next year.

Elie

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Neale Swinnerton <ne...@isismanor.com> wrote:

[Bruce Durling]

OK. That is just a little bit awesome. :-D

[Oliver Godby]

Dammit, I wanted to say that Bruce! ;-)

Seriously, this is great things to hear about; it gives me some faith that I'll get to introduce Clojure in the environment that I am working in at the moment :-)

Cheers!

[Malcolm Sparks]

Ahem, sorry for the delay Bruce...

In Deutsche Bank we have a few Clojure applications either in production or going into production, both in London and New York. DB also had a couple of devs at last week's Clojure Conj from our development centre in Cary, North Carolina. 

My team in London built 4 apps from a common Clojure platform (Fandango) that originally grew out of some experimental research. For a lot of us old Java devs, Clojure was simply a faster way of writing the same Java (particularly for web stuff where the shortened dev/test cycle is important) and 3 of these applications had functional requirements that were both difficult and urgent. 

There are other smaller examples of Clojure in DB but there's also some Groovy and JRuby. I opted for Clojure because I believe it has greater long term 'safety' for developing 'enterprise' apps and platforms. See my blog for an example: http://blog.malcolmsparks.com/?p=104  (blatant plug!)  I've got a number of other examples in the pipeline that I'll post in due course.

I hasn't all been plain sailing and we've learned a lot of lessons. Adopting a new language requires an ongoing commitment (for support/maintenance of applications) that the 'project-to-project' management of large organisations can work against. I think the best course is to use Clojure for satellite and 'non-core' applications, show its value, build up a skills base and then bring it to more serious projects.