Inspired by Glenn Vanderburg's article on Clojure templating frameworks, I decided to try using Fleet for my latest pet project. Fleet has a very nice interface. I can call a single function to create new Clojure functions for every template in a directory. That really makes the templates feel like part of the language. Unfortunately, Glenn's otherwise excellent article didn't talk about how to connect Fleet into Compojure or Ring. I chose to interpret that as a compliment, springing from his high esteem of our abilities.
My first attempt, just calling the template function directly as a route handler resulted in the following:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No implementation of method: :render of protocol: #'compojure.response/Renderable found for class: fleet.util.CljString
Ah, you've just got to love Clojure errors. After you understand the problem, you can always see that the error precisely described what was wrong. As an aid to helping you understand the problem... well, best not to dwell on that.
The clue is the protocol. Compojure knows how to turn many different things into valid response maps. It can handle nil, strings, maps, functions, references, files, seqs, and input streams. Not bad for 22 lines of code!
There's probably a simpler way that I can't see right now, but I decided to have CljString support the same protocol.
Take a close look at the call to extend-protocol on lines 12 through 15. I'm adding a protocol--which I didn't create--onto a Java class--which I also didn't create. My extension calls a function that was created at runtime, based on the template files in a directory. There's deep magic happening beneath those 3 lines of code.
Because I extended Renderable to cover CljString, I can use any template function directly as a route function, as in line 17. (The function views/index was created by the call to fleet-ns on line 10.)
So, I glued together two libraries without changing the code to either one, and without resorting to Factories, Strategies, or XML-configured injection.
