It is with great pleasure that I can point to several upcoming presentations about pallet, given by members of the pallet community.
...If you have configuration that uses template configuration files, you are practising neither configuration as code nor configuration as data. Having configuration locked away in template files reduces its visibility, and makes it hard for you to query it. It might be easier to write configuration code to use templates, but it will come back to bite you.
... [1 comment]Basic Nagios support was recently added to pallet, and while very simple to use, this blog post should make it even simpler. The overall philosophy is to configure the nagios service monitoring definitions along with the service itself, rather than have monolithic nagios configuration, divorced from the configuration of the various nodes.
...I dislike most mocking, and try and avoid it as much as possible. Sometimes it is however the only realistic way of testing. I did a quick survey of mocking tools in clojure, and found them very much reflecting the Java mocking libraries. Clojure has a few more dynamic capabilities than Java, so I thought a little about how these could be used to make a simple mocking facility, and atticus is what I came up with.
... [1 comment]We need help choosing a logo. Vote for your favourite, and give your comments on #pallet on freenode irc, or to the mailing list.
...I recently needed to move a server from dedicated hosting to a cloud server. The existing server had been configured over time by several people, with little documentation. I want to make sure that this time everything was documented, and what better way than doing that than using an automated configuration tool.
...Let's face it, many of us hate writing shell scripts, and with good reason. Personally, it's not so much the shell language itself that puts me off, but organising everything around it; how do you deploy your scripts, how do you arrange to call other scripts, how do you manage the dependencies between your scripts? Pallet aims to solve these problems by embedding shell script in clojure.
...Recently I got fed up with a couple of warts in swank-clojure, so I made a couple of small fixes, and that lead to a couple of new features. Using SLIME with Clojure has never been as smooth as using it with Common Lisp, and the lack of debug functionality beyond the display of stack traces is particularly onerous. Recently, George Jahad and Alex Osborne's debug-repl showed the possibility of adding a break macro to enter the debugger with the call stack intact and local variables visible. This functionality is now in swank-clojure.
...I have released Criterium, a new project for benchmarking code in Clojure. I found Brent Broyer's article on Java benchmarking which explains many of the pitfalls of benchmarking on the JVM, and Criterion, a benchmarking library in Haskell.
...FluidDB, a "cloud" based triple-store, where the objects are immutable and can be tagged by anyone, launched about a month ago. As a another step to getting up to speed with Clojure, I decided to write a client library, and clj-fluiddb was born. The code was very simple, especially as I could base the library on cl-fluiddb, a Common-Lisp library.
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