To begin with, I’m a very happy Clojurian, but not when I’m working with interops. I’m using Google apis extensively for some features in my product; and so far the experience has been quite awful. I’ve been contemplating it for a while and here are my pain points.

  1. It is hard to look up for what method a java object supports.
  2. It is hard to understand the inheritance and polymorphism designs without actually looking at the java codes.
  3. 1,2 are amplified all the more because I’m using calva with vscode. The IDE’s java support is not as good as that of intellij.

How do you work with interops in general? I welcome any tips/advices/know-hows.

  • serpix@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    1. IntelliJ plus type hinting code gives method lookup popups:

    (defn foo [^^GoogleFactoryProxy factory-proxy] (doto (.fooMethod factory-proxy) (.addStuff (stuff))))

    doto is great for functions returning void. You can still use threading macro if the Java object returns self.

    Method hints pop up after the first dot.

    If you need to implement interfaces or extend objects then I would write wrappers which do the reify work and pass function arguments to those wrappers. Otherwise the code becomes noisy and has less signal.