Caution: my English is far from perfect. (Русский тоже не всегда хорош).

Friday 28 November 2008

Clojure at Work: Interactively Control Running Java System

We are developing a system on Java. It must call another system and at some point the other system calls our system back via web service. Therefore I can not test this interaction in a stand-alone test, our code must be executed in an HTTP container (we use Tomcat).

In case if the code does not work as desired, I need to stop Tomcat, fix and rebuild Java sources and try again. And what is worse, before the code I am working on can be tested, it performs initialization that takes about a minute. These stumbles are little bit annoying for those who are used to fully dynamic development environments as Lisp.

I decided to embed Clojure into the system during development and connect to it with SLIME to create interactive testing/development environment.

First, I followed Bill Clementson's instructions for usual (not embedded) Clojure/SLIME setup.

After it worked, I started to look for a way to embed Clojure/swank into existing Java system, but didn't find any conventional way to do this. Therefore I torn out a piece of code from the clojure.lang.Repl class and instead of standard input, feed it with commands to start swank (which I found in the *inferior-lisp* buffer when Clojure/SLIME is started "normally", from Emacs).

All this is packed into simple clojure.jsp page in my web application directory. And clojure.jar is placed into WEB-INF/lib.

When the JSP is opened in browser it displays: "swank has been stared".

After that, I use M-X slime-connect from Emacs. The port number, as you can see from the code, is 7777.

What is the result?

I can inspect and control the running system, for example invoke functions I need to test or change object states.

But I must admit that the level of flexibility is lower than I hoped for. The point is that I can not interactively change Java code (which constitutes all the system). To be more flexible, the system must be written on Lisp entirely.

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