Readme — com.fulcrologic/fulcro-rad 0.0.13-alpha

Fulcro Rapid Application Development Tools

A library using Fulcro and Pathom to create full-stack single-page web, mobile, and desktop applications with a rich (and potentially federated) data model quickly.

This library is marked Alpha. It is not intended for the light-hearted at this monent. We will intentionally make breaking changes until the Alpha marking is removed. Once out of Alpha we will follow the Clojure community standard of only adding features or reducing requirements. Bigger version numbers will just mean "better", and bigger changes in the version number will simply indicate the subjective magnitude of the improvement.

The general goals of this project are:

Establish extensible patterns with pre-written components where almost any aspect of RAD can be tuned to fit your needs, and can also be escaped from entirely with minimal impact to your project when the pre-written components prove insufficient to your needs. RAD is built to be easy to grow, and easy to leave if you manage to outgrow it.
- The only aspect of RAD that is "core" is the description of your data model in attributes. Those are nothing more than fully-open maps describing your data model, and it is difficult to imagine those causing harm since they tie your program to nothing more than your own global description of your data.
Provide a central data model around the concept of attributes. An attribute in RAD is pretty much just like a Datomic attribute: it has a fully-qualified name (e.g. :account/email) that can be globally distinct in its meaning, a type, a cardinality, and must be combined with an identity and value to fully represent a fact in the world.
- Identity itself (e.g. :account/id) is nothing more than an attribute that can help you find others.
- Non-identity attributes may appear under any number of identities, making for an open data model.
- Attributes can represent virtual things: edges in the graph that are not reified (require queries to calculate), values in reports that are aggregates, etc.
- All attributes can be given an arbitrary set of user/plugin defined information, which can be used by your code or the code of plugins to provide features around the data model (they can even define how to obtain or calculate the data itself).
- They define the structure for fully federated data systems: that is to say your data can live in any number of places, and can be seamlessly combined into the user-interface. Most of this is accomplished by the combined abilities of raw Fulcro and Pathom, but attributes play a central role in describing your data model to RAD itself.
Provide the ability to use an automated database layer that:
- is easy to escape from. If you outgrow it, the layer won’t lock you in.
- can generate some amount of schema that is useful for at least early-stage projects.
- allows you to leverage your own schema.
- can integrate into RAD in order to serve and save data around common forms and reports.
Provide a system for the rendering and interaction with forms and reports.
- A Form is any screen where a tree of data is loaded and saved "together", and where validation and free-form inputs are common.
- A Report is any screen where the data contains a mix of read-only, derived, and aggregate data. This data may be organized in many ways (graphically, in columns, in rows, as a kanban board). Interactions with the data commonly include linking (navigation), filtering, pagination, and abstract actions that can affect arbitrary things (e.g. delete this item, move that card, zoom that chart).
Any generated rendering must be easy to escape, but when used it must also be extensible in four dimensions: data type, data style, visual appearance, and platform.
- Data type: If you extend the data model with a new type, you can also extend the rendering system to support it.
- Data style: A single type (e.g. decimal) may represent different visual things: USD, percentage, etc.
- Visual appearance: Beyond simple data style: a report might need to be a chart, or you may simply want to take fine-grained control of rendering.
- Platform: Assuming you’re having RAD generate UI, it should be possible to specify the platform (e.g. Mobile vs Web). This allows RAD to stand up apps with different targets with minimal changes to your application code.

Usage

At the moment your best bet for understanding usage is to look at the RAD Demo project.

Current SNAPSHOT CI status:

Current RELEASE CI status:

The RAD project has ambitious goals, but only one primary contributor who is very busy.

Documentation is currently available in the docstrings of the namespaces (most up-to-date), and you can refer to the Fulcro RAD Demo project (status varies, but is an accurate representation of what is working). There is a (likely inaccurate and out of date) start on a book at http://book.fulcrologic.com/RAD.html.

Unpaid questions, issue reports, or requests cannot be supported at this time.

Paid support for RAD and related libraries is available from Fulcrologic, LLC. You may ask questions on the #fulcro channel of Clojurians Slack.

LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c), Fulcrologic, LLC

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.