Experimenting with Clojure + Ember.js and ClojureScript with Om

For a personal project I want to make a web app with a "rich client" interface. I had originally planned to write this app in Haskell with the Yesod web framework. However, as much as I like Haskell, I do still have occasional time wasting problems with cabal, Yesod, and sometimes with non-pure Haskell code. My gut feeling is that I will get things done faster if I use Clojure.

In the past I have experimented using Clojure and Ember.js but until today I have not spent much time with ClojureScript and Om (I have written web apps using ClojureScript, so the learning curve is trying to use Om).

Getting started with Om is straight forward. I used the David Nolen's Om tutorial into the skeleton project that the chestnut lein plugin created.

I am not much of a user interface expert, and I am not sure how much time I will devote to learning Om. If I earned my living doing web apps, this learning curve would be very worthwhile. I usually use simple tools to make web apps like: Ruby + Sinatra, sometimes Rails, often Clojure + composure + hiccup.

A few years ago I did experiment with Ember.js and created small projects on embers-clj sample project. I removed the use of the old noir library and made this a straight-up compojure app. I also changed the JavaScript Ember.js application to remove two deprecation warnings.

I am leaning towards using Ember.js, mostly because I already am familiar with it. I also like the combination of Ember.js with a node.js backend (my started project for Ember.js and node.js is also on github). There are advantages to using JavaScript for both client and server sides but I like Clojure better.

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