Re-RSS - A Clojure RSS Reader
Jul 24, 2020
# Contents
# Expectations
I was expecting to do some work on implementing link filters today and also on submitting the PR for the Athena RegEx issue. Unfortunately I didn’t end up doing much work on the Link Filters (although I really want to. Implementing a new feature would be really cool). However I did get started on my own re-frame project today. I’m trying to build a functioning RSS Reader in Clojure!
# What I learned today
Biggest lesson for today is that Clojure -> ClojureScript is not as easy as it looks. There’s a lot of subtle differences that can come bite you in the ass. I ran into one issue where I was trying to use the slurp function to pull data from a website but slurp doesn’t exist in ClojureScript so that didn’t pan out.
I ended up having to download an external library - cljs-http to try and make requests from within CLJS. But even this has some issues. Classic issue of CORS. I can never escape CORS for as long as I live.
Beyond that, creating a new project turned out to be quite easy with the lein new re-frame <app> +cider +kondo command. From there, you get a nicely structured re-frame project! I started out by trying to create a function to validate a RSS feed URL by using existing feed validators. (Might have to just build my own damn validator and parser for this).
# Takeaways
Didn’t really have any big insights today. Just that building a web-app with Cljs might be a bit more unintuitive than I thought.