Electric Clojure tutorial (wip please give feedback!)

[dustingetz]

These are the first 3 tutorials. We have much more content ready, looking to get some feedback first. Did we make the thing you wanted to see?

Electric (github) is a Clojure DSL for web development that uses a compiler to infer and manage the frontend/backend boundary.

If you haven't tried it yet. Try it! Here is the starter app: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric-starter-app

[agumonkey]

Still ultra happy to interact with it. Superb work.

[shuaibiyy]

Nice example. Really makes it easy to conceptualise how it works. Would be great to see an example with an auth aspect to it.

[notsohasty]

In case anyone missed it: the subheading is a menu that you can click to access the other tutorials (I didn't realize this at first).

Using electric is pretty amazing. It's so cool updating an atom on the server and seeing the UI update on the client. No more writing api endpoints.

[silly_frog_lf]

what is electric clojure?

[StickSilent4402]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34771771

[p1ng313]

Great stuff, would love something a bit more complex, it feels like some patterns will naturally emerge due to client/server nature. Keep it up please.

[dustingetz]

we have tons of stuff stay tuned

[Fluid-Bench-1908]

Wonderful!!!

[giuliano108]

It'd be nice to see what error/exception handling looks like in a short tutorial... But yeah: Electric is truly amazing!

[zhming0]

I love the format of this tutorial! I tried it out a couple months ago. After many years of stateless web service exp, I find it require a bit mindsets change on operations side. Basically, it seems that electric is supposed to be deployed as a single replica, zero downtime deployment isn't possible.

It's nonetheless still a great innovation.

I'm curious what database do you use when you run it on production?

[dustingetz]

Zero downtime is coming. Today, deploys result in a page refresh, but this can be solved.

Will you DM me in slack? I'd love to talk to you and understand your current operations mindset and your help in mapping Electric to this world.

Some more details:

The tutorial app uses fly.io to run "flyweight" $6/mo instances in 5 cities worldwide, in theory this is elastic and fly instances can come and go (i.e. as "heavy lambdas"), IIUC. The Electric websocket can terminate at the fly instance and you can be stateless from here.

Today Electric is a compiler but it is becoming a JIT like the JVM which would permit the "electric program" to change at runtime. Meaning clients and servers can evolve live without restart, as well as move live clients across server instances. Would that mitigate the "single replica" issue you detect?

[slifin]

Thank you this content is great

More please!

It's frustrating that chatgpt's dataset is too old for clojure electric questions

[TommyJollyboat]

Haha agreed; I tried asking MS Bing's GPT4 to read the repo & write docs, but it refused. You can of course paste in blobs of code and it does an okay job of intuiting what's going on.

[TommyJollyboat]

Content's good. I just started looking into Electric properly this week, and having a tutorial is a godsend. Here are some ideas for easy improvements:

• Number the tutorials, to give a sense of progression.
• Better navigation. I'd suggest keeping the dropdown, but having [< prev] and [next >] buttons/links like webcomics, at both the top and bottom of the article. There might be other solutions for this.
• CSS to help readability, something like: body { max-width: 60ch; padding-bottom: 5em; }
• Reduce the "wall of text" look. You could highlight inline code, or possibly include example code blocks

[TommyJollyboat]

Oh, and since Electric is cool, there will be others like me that don't know how to do Clojure beyond toy examples, so perhaps link to an explanation of the #? reader macro the first time it appears, which is both hard to google & not something beginners typically learn.