clj-helidon - Ring adapter for Helidon.io

** This library is experimental and for testing and educational use only **

A library that adapts Helidon 4 for the Clojure Ring.

The main argument for Helidon is that it's based on new (available from JDK 19 onwards) virtual threads. The virtual thread in Java is a lightweight thread that does not consume a platform thread. This enables async programming with the same API as traditional blocking APIs. This means that applications using virtual threads can freely use the existing blocking I/O operations and still be fully async.

For ring, this means that you can forego the use of async handlers and still get all the benefits of async.

Helidon is a very efficient and fast WebServer, for more information about the performance see https://medium.com/helidon/helidon-n%C3%ADma-helidon-on-virtual-threads-130bb2ea2088#f3b5

Status

Alpha release, subject to changes and no guarantees of updates.

Usage

Add clj-helidon as a dependency to your deps.edn:

io.github.metosin/clj-helidon {:git/tag "0.0.12"
                               :git/sha "0822426"}

Start the server:

(ns my-app
  (:require [metosin.clj-helidon.server :as helidon]))

(defn handler [req]
  {:status 200
   :body   "Hello"})

(def server (helidon/create-server handler {:port 8080}))

(println "Server listening on port" (helidon/port server))

The create-server function accepts a ring handler function or routing data, and optionally a configuration map. Configuration can contain:

• :host - The hostname or string IP address to bind the server (defaults to "localhost")
• :port - The local port server should listen (defaults to 0)
• :media-context - MediaContext to use for content negotiation

When the port is 0 the server binds to any available port (very handy in testing).

The return value is an server object. The metosin.clj-helidon.server namespace provides functions that take server object as argument. These are:

• server - Returns the instance of io.helidon.webserver.WebServer
• port - Returns the local port the server is bind to
• running? - Returns true if server is running, otherwise returns false
• shutdown - Closes the server

The server object also implements the java.io.Closeable interface, so you can use the standard clojure clojure.core/with-open to open and automatically close the server. This is quite handy in testing.

TODO

[x] SSE support [ ] WebSocket support [ ] HTTPS [ ] API docs [ ] Perf tests [ ] Split lib into multiple smaller libs [ ] grpc

License

Copyright © 2023 Metosin Oy and contributors.

Available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0, see LICENSE