Article-Series

why not use Electron? A few days ago I gave a talk at the Clojure Meetup Berlin about building GUIs with Clojure and JavaFX. Here is the abstract: Building declarative GUIs with Clojure, JavaFX and fn-fx (Dr. Nils Blum-Oeste) JavaFX is the current standard GUI framework included in most Java distributions and the successor to Swing. It is readily available via interop to any Clojure developer. I would like to give an introduction to an alternative approach using halgari/fn-fx: A thin Clojure wrapper around JavaFX by Timothy Baldrige that allows building GUIs declaratively from a single application state atom instead of dealing with the mutable JavaFX objects directly. ...

As stated in a previous post I am in the process of building a GUI application and I would like to use Clojure for that. In this post I would like to write about my experiences building a small app for evaluation of the halgari/fn-fx Clojure library that aims at building GUIs with JavaFX in a declarative way, similar to what React does for the browser DOM. Disclaimer: Why not Electron? I also considered using Electron but I would prefer a solution that runs on the JVM so that I can make full use of that. However, if you can live with the JS runtime I would definitely recommend checking out Electron too. Probably I will have a follow-up post about Electron. :) ...

As I am in the process of developing an application for data analysis on chemical data the need for building a desktop GUI came up. Why desktop you ask? Excellent question! I think for this particular project, the combination of ease of use, data privacy and performance make it worth exploring an approach with a local, self-contained application instead of anything involving remote servers. Actually in the end we might build a SaaS too or move to such a model completely. ...

In the previous article we did define a vision and the key features for a MVP of our app. Now we will discover the domain of our app and get a model of it. Such a domain model is a conceptual model of the entities and their relationships relevant for you app. Why you should do it The reason to produce this is to clarify your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve with your app. It is just a structured way to think about your software. By doing so you often will change your view on the problem: You will discover things you did not consider beforehand. In other cases you may be able to simplify your initial ideas. ...

This is the second part of this Tutorial series. The first article can be found here: How to build a WebApp: Strategic Planning If you are familiar with agile methodologies you may want to avoid a lot of documentation. In general I think this is a good approach. But it does not mean, that you should never ever create any documentation. This first step aims at structuring your ideas and make you think about the product. ...

Intro Hi and welcome to the first article in this series. I will cover the whole process of building a modern Webapp. We will start with an initial planning (covered in this article) and finish with the public deployment of the app. I will rather focus on the development process than on implementation. There are a lot of great tutorials out there to learn how to code and implement stuff. This series has two goals: ...