Using Clojure and Ext/JS

Ext/JS is a popular framework for building Ajax interfaces. The model for Ajax applications is dead simple. Build a UI using JavaScript, and populate it using JSON retrieved from the server (I'm pretty sure there's more to it, but I like simple!).

JavaScript and Lisp languages should go together pretty well, Doug Crockford has described JavaScript as Lisp in C's clothing.

I haven't done enough JavaScript programming to be dangerous just yet, so I'll start with something simple from the Ext tutorial. The goal will be to display a data-grid populated by stuff retrieved using the persistence API I looked at previously. Here's the end goal:

.

Firstly we need to write a servlet that will retrieve all the stories. If we were going to do this properly we'd parametrize this with restrictions (find me all stories between X and Y, or retrieve the top 100 stories). I'm confident that no-one will ever use this site, so I'll just go for brute force retrieve everything!

Using the persistence API we prepare a query object to find everything matching the given type and lazily convert this (map) each element across using entity-as-map

(defn get-all
  [type]
  (let [query (Query. (str type))
        service (DatastoreServiceFactory/getDatastoreService)]
    (map entity-to-map (.asIterable (.prepare service query)))))

Now we can retrieve stories, we need to squirt this back as JSON. There's a package, clojure-json that does this for you, but I (foolishly) decided to do it the quick and dirty way and print out a string!

(ns news.liststory                                    
  (:use (news appengine))
  (:gen-class :extends javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet))

(defn story-to-json
  [s]
  (str "{\"title\":\"" (get s "title") "\"" ",\"body\":" "\"" (get s "body") "\"},"))

(defn -doGet
  [_ request response]
  (.setContentType response "text/xml")
  (let [w (.getWriter response) stories (get-all "story")]
    (.println w (str "{\"totalCount\":" (count stories) ",\"stories\":["))
    (doseq [story stories]
      (.println w (str \tab (story-to-json story))))
    (.println w (str "]}"))))      

So what were aiming to print out is a JSON representation of the stories that looks a little like this.

{"totalCount":3,"stories":[
 {"title":"Home of the Clojure Language","body":"http://www.clojure.org/"},
 {"title":"Jeff's web page, full of rubbish!","body":"http://www.fatvat.co.uk"},
 {"title":"Wikipedia on Clojure","body":"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clojure"},
]}

Finally, we need something to render this. I took an example as a starting point and ended up with this. (Note that it's referencing local host because I'm running off a local development environment)

Ext.onReady(function(){
  var store = new Ext.data.JsonStore({
    root: 'stories',
    totalProperty: 'totalCount',
    idProperty: 'storyId',
    fields: [
      'body', 'title'
    ],

    proxy: new Ext.data.HttpProxy({
      url: 'http://localhost:8080/liststory?'
    })
  });

  var grid = new Ext.grid.GridPanel({
    el: 'story-grid',
    title: 'Clojure News!',
    store: store,
    loadMask: true,
    height: 400,
    columns:[{
      header: 'Link',
      dataIndex: 'body'
    },{
      header: 'Description',
      dataIndex: 'title'
    }]
  });

  grid.render();
  store.load({});
});

That was pretty painless to build. The painful bit was writing out JSON as a string. Lesson learnt, use a library (or build a decent abstraction).

I'm not sure I like mixing my languages, I'd really like a way to have Lisp goodness across the whole stack. One potential option for this is to use Google Web Toolkit. GWT compiles Java into cross-platform Javascript. I could (probably) have Clojure compile to Java which in turn is compiled to Javascript. That sounds fun!