Birds With Luminus

My son wanted some help with some homework. He had an assignment where you listened to birds on a birdsite, and identified them.

The site lets you type a name of a bird, shows an image and plays the birds song. My son wanted the birds to appear in random, withouth titles and so on. The site didnt allow for any customization however.

So, to provide the automation you can either do a client side hack, or a server side hack. In both cases its a pretty simple thing to do.

I decided to have a look at Luminous, http://www.luminusweb.net/, wich is a pre-packaged set of libraries for Clojure web development.

I was pretty amazed at how slick Luminous is. Just instantiate a Lein template, and you have got a working sample! Not unecessarily bloated either.

I had the entire random-birds site running in just a short time, and most of that time was used to figure out the url:s to the bird songs!

The Luminus documentation is pretty good, so I wont repeat it here.

The main selling points for me where:

• A simple "lein new luminus laxor" and you have a working setup out of the box.
• Automatic reload of code and templates work out of the box
• Changing the app is fast enough for immediately taking care of feedback from my son