noir-async

Seamless, concise, async webservices for clojure.

noir-async integrates the noir web framework with the aleph async library with minimal syntax. With noir-async you can create well organized webapps, with both synchronous and asynchronous logic, and multiple asynchronous endpoints.

How it works

If you aren't already familiar with noir you should read up on it a bit. noir-async simply provides an additional async version of defpage, called defpage-async. noir-async will not affect defpage, which will still work, and still run in a threaded fashion.

You will also need to setup your server.clj differently, there's an example at the bottom of this README.

For a running example a chatroom using a websocket can be found at noir-async-chat

Getting Started:

Add [noir-async 1.0.0] to your project.clj

Here's an example route that responds in one shot:

; Note, same syntax as noir's defpage, but with "conn" parameter
(defpage-async "/route" [] conn
  (async-push conn {:status 404 :body "Couldn't find it!"}))

This is an example route that handles a websocket:

(defpage-async "/echo" [] conn
  (on-receive conn (fn [m] (async-push conn m))))

Finally, here's an example of responding in a chunked fashion:

(defpage-async "/always-chunky" [] conn
  ;; Sending the header explicitly indicates a chunked response
  (async-push conn {:status 200 :chunked true})
  (async-push conn "chunk one")
  (async-push conn "chunk two")
  (close conn))

Since it uses an identical interface for both websockets and regular HTTP, if you want to handle them differently be sure to use the websocket? and regular? functions to discern them.

Setting up server.clj

In your server.clj, you'll want to use aleph as a server explicitly. Be sure to replace noir-async-chat with the appropriate namespace.

(ns noir-async-chat.server
  (:use aleph.http
        noir.core
        lamina.core)
  (:require
    [noir.server :as nr-server] ))

(nr-server/load-views "src/noir_async_chat/views/")

(defn -main [& m]
  (let [mode (keyword (or (first m) :dev))
        port (Integer. (get (System/getenv) "PORT" "3000"))
        noir-handler (nr-server/gen-handler {:mode mode})]
    (start-http-server
      (wrap-ring-handler noir-handler)
      {:port port :websocket true})))

License

Copyright (C) 2011 Andrew Cholakian

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.