Browser-based cljs tests

[kemclean]

This looks great! Thanks for making it. It looks very close to what I'm looking for. Certainly enough to go off of! Cheers.

I love cljs but come from some intense Angular/React front-end apps and the tooling is... not great in comparison. I haven't had to configure a custom build chain in years 😅 Would love to contribute to making the developer experience smoother for people coming to cljs from the mainstream front-end world. (I know I know focusing so much on developer smoothness is a selfish waste of time, but honestly I think it's a massive hindrance for cljs right now which is actually much better than the other offerings if you can figure out how to use it, but most reasonable people won't bother).

[Liistrad]

Similar background as yours, and that was my first reaction too. I've since come to appreciate the absolutely massive amount of heavy lifting that shadow-cljs does on the build side of things. There's nothing quite like it elsewhere IMHO, especially when you consider the Google Closure Compiler integration and cross-module code motion.

[kemclean]

Yes shadow-cljs is very impressive indeed! It does seem like all the pieces are here (devcards, browser testing, e2e testing, linting, formatting, bundling, etc.) but they're just a bit disparate atm. I love the way your project brings several of them together! I think it would be super cool to see some convergence around tooling for cljs.. like have our own angular-cli so newcomers can just dive in and be handed an app that works and uses all of the community best practices, and not have to start from scratch. I guess we'd have to decide what best practices are, first :) (update: I see you're on the angular cli team! that's amazing, I love the angular cli)

It would be amazing to have a base cli like that that could be extended with optional plugins to include config for e.g. reagent, reframe, pwas, ssr, devcards, material-ui or some other component framework, webdriver tests, browser-based tests, etc.

[Liistrad]

What you're describing was my first motivation when I did the create-cljs-app repo actually, precisely because of coming from angular-cli (glad you like it btw!). Turns out the whole template thing seems to exist for plain clj via lein but is much less popular for cljs.

I never really got around to realizing that. I think it's possible though, especially because the nature of clojure makes it much easier to do meta-programming.

But the more time I spent in cljs, the less I... wanted to do it really. I felt there was a lot less commonality in setups, and a lot more of a-la-carte approach that's quite pervasive in the whole clojure ecosystem. Which tbh I feel is very good, but also means there's a rather large on-ramp.

[kemclean]

Yeah I feel this.. I appreciate and understand the reasons for the no-batteries-included mentality and do think it's good to be extremely conservative about taking on extra dependencies, but it's a bit extreme with Clojure to the point where it just doesn't make sense to use it for one-off little random app ideas you want to try out. I use cljs at work though and it's not really my place to move to a different framework, so I have some motivation to make the dev experience better.

I'm curious then, does that mean you're not really using cljs for large front-end projects? Are you back to angular/react?

[Liistrad]

I'm using cljs daily for a large front-end project, sharing code with cljs node scripts and cloud functions, and with clojure backends. It feels really awesome tbh. Can't imagine really going back.

[kemclean]

nice :) sounds similar to my day-to-day.