lisp

I dislike most mocking, and try and avoid it as much as possible. Sometimes it is however the only realistic way of testing. I did a quick survey of mocking tools in clojure, and found them very much reflecting the Java mocking libraries. Clojure has a few more dynamic capabilities than Java, so I thought a little about how these could be used to make a simple mocking facility, and atticus is what I came up with.

Let's face it, many of us hate writing shell scripts, and with good reason. Personally, it's not so much the shell language itself that puts me off, but organising everything around it; how do you deploy your scripts, how do you arrange to call other scripts, how do you manage the dependencies between your scripts? Pallet aims to solve these problems by embedding shell script in clojure.

Recently I got fed up with a couple of warts in swank-clojure, so I made a couple of small fixes, and that lead to a couple of new features. Using SLIME with Clojure has never been as smooth as using it with Common Lisp, and the lack of debug functionality beyond the display of stack traces is particularly onerous. Recently, George Jahad and Alex Osborne's debug-repl showed the possibility of adding a break macro to enter the debugger with the call stack intact and local variables visible. This functionality is now in swank-clojure.

FluidDB, a "cloud" based triple-store, where the objects are immutable and can be tagged by anyone, launched about a month ago. As a another step to getting up to speed with Clojure, I decided to write a client library, and clj-fluiddb was born. The code was very simple, especially as I could base the library on cl-fluiddb, a Common-Lisp library.

I wanted to experiment with building a webapp using Clojure, so I tried setting up the Compojure web framework. I am new to clojure, so I am not sure if this is the preferred way of doing things, but here goes anyway.

The facility of Ruby on Rails' test, development and production environments is one of those features that goes almost unremarked, but which makes using rails more pleasant. No doubt everyone has their own solution for this in other environments, and while I am sure Common Lisp is not lacking in examples, I have not seen an idiomatic implementation. In developing cl-blog-generator I came up with the following solution.

I have now added a comment system to cl-blog-generator. My requirements were for a simple, low overhead, commenting system, preferable one that could possibly be fully automated.

I recently uploaded some links to my cl-blog-generator project, and have been getting some feedback with comparisons to other blog site generators, or compilers, such as Steve Kemp's Chronicle, or Jekyll as used on GitHub Pages. Compared to these, cl-blog-generator is immature, but takes a different approach in several areas that Charles Stewart suggested might be worth exploring. I look forward to any comments you might have.