This month’s meetup of the Cambridge NonDysFunctional Programmers will be hosted here at Metail’s Cambridge office next Thursday (26th November) from 6.30pm. I (Ray Miller) will be giving a hands-on introduction to web development with Clojure, where attendees get to implement their first Clojure web application from the ground up.

Along the way, we’ll learn about the Compojure routing library, Ring requests and responses, middleware, and generating HTML with hiccup. Time permitting, we’ll also cover interacting with a relational database and using buddy to add session-based authentication and authorization to our application.

The theme running through the tutorial is implementation of an ad server (an example I shamelessly stole from Dan Benjamin’s Meet Sinatra screencast). This demo application delivers a Javascript snippet to embed random ads in a web page and tracks user click-throughs. It also provides an administrative interface for reporting and managing ads. If you’ve already seen Dan’s screencast, you’ll see how Clojure compares with Sinatra to implement the same application.

See the Meetup page for full details and to sign up.