Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Most Swing examples don’t translate well into Clojure because they are so thoroughly embedded in the object-oriented paradigm. A typical Swing example has a main class that extends a container class and implements some *Listener interface. Clojure beginners who try to port these examples may think they need to mimic that same structure. In fact,…
GUI layout is hard. You’d be crazy to do it without a GUI designer like Netbeans. Well, I’m pretty crazy. So I’m going to do some GUI layout in Clojure. And I’m going to use the most intimidating of Java’s GUI layout classes, the GridBagLayout. Conceptually, GridBagLayout is pretty straightforward. It places components on a…
One of the great things about Clojure is how it can make Java programming easier and less verbose. Take Swing. It takes a ton of code to render even a simple GUI. Most tutorials don’t even tackle it without an IDE like NetBeans. But we’ve got something Java lacks: macros! In this post, I’ll build…
My previous post left you with a Clojure/Swing GUI consisting of one window and one button. Boring! Let’s make it do something. To catch up, start a Clojure REPL and type: (import ‘(javax.swing JFrame JPanel JButton)) (def button (JButton. “Click Me!”)) (def panel (doto (JPanel.) (.add button))) (def frame (doto (JFrame. “Hello Frame”) (.setSize 200…
Swing is the GUI standard for Java. Clojure is the awesomeness standard for Java. Let’s make an awesome GUI. Make a Window Interactive development is fun. Fire up a Clojure REPL, and type this: (import ‘javax.swing.JFrame) (def frame (JFrame. “Hello Frame”)) (.setSize frame 200 200) (.setVisible frame true) Hey Presto, there’s a window! (It might…
I was lucky enough to see a talk by Barbara Liskov, the grande dame of computer science. The talk was titled “The Power of Abstraction,” and it covered Liskov’s work on programming languages in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily a language called CLU. Update 1/14/2010: Video of the same talk is available here: OOPSLA Keynote:…
I’ve been fascinated with RDF for years, but I always end up frustrated when I try to use it. How do you read/write/manipulate RDF data in code? Sure, there are lots of libraries, but they all represent RDF data as its primitive structures: statements, resources, literals, etc. Working with data through these APIs feels like…
I’ve said It’s About the Libraries, and indeed, one of the major selling points of Clojure is that it can call Java libraries directly. But there’s more to it than that. Libraries are just one benefit to building Clojure on top of Java, or, more accurately, on top of Java the platform. Look around you,…
I promised, in my previous post, that I would show you how to use the latest-and-greatest versions of Clojure and clojure-contrib in your Maven projects. Here’s that post. Formos Software maintains a Maven server with nightly builds of Clojure and contrib at http://tapestry.formos.com/maven-snapshot-repository/ Here’s a complete pom.xml file with dependencies on both Clojure and clojure-contrib:…
Update Sept. 4: How to get the latest builds of Clojure & Contrib Maven is a touchy subject. People tend to have strong opinions about it. But like it or not, it’s the de-facto standard for dependency management in the Java world. Clojure lives in the Java world, so that means we have to live…