Why use apache in front of jetty when jetty is a decent server for serving binary data (unlike older versions of tomcat).
Why not just enable jettys built-in automatic file-update-deploy stuff, and just use git to push the data and deploy that way?
I've used .war files and tomcat which is dead simple to deploy with the downside that there's no way to start swank-server (unless maybe disabling the security manager). Another downside is that .war files tend to be rather big.
Why use screen + emacs? Just recompiling things in emacs might probably introduce weird bugs as code is not removed from the system when it is removed from a source file. Seems a bit tough to manually go through all the source files in the right order and recompile them. It'd be easier IMHO to just start a swank server with every jetty started.
Under the described setup, you don't have to recompile anything. Using the REPL, you can redefine functions one at a time, without ever taking down the server. For a simple site, I think this trumps ease of deployment.
Clojure does allow you to remove symbol mappings from a namespace. The only problem with deploying via the REPL is that there isn't a function for atomically deploying a namespace, or set of namespaces. I suspect one would have to use a global lock to pause all request-handling threads for the second or so Clojure needs to teardown and reload all its libraries.
Looking into this, you mean using (use 'mynamespace :reload) instead of C-c C-k - that is a good idea!
It should be trivial to write a ring middleware to reload everything between every request (for a railsy development environment) maybe a version for production use that checks all files for changes every 1 minute or so.
I think it's a touch trickier than that. As far as I'm aware, a reload cannot remove namespace mappings; it can just add new ones and overwrite existing ones. So with continual reloads you might find yourself with old deprecated functions cluttering up your namespace.
Another problem is that Clojure loads up namespaces sequentially, rather than atomically. So you might end up with an a new version of one function calling the old version of another.
In order for your reloading middleware to be robust, I suspect you'd have to (1) wait for any existing request-handling threads to finish, (2) suspend any new request-handling threads, (3) reload your namespaces, (4) resume any suspended request threads.
Why not just enable jettys built-in automatic file-update-deploy stuff, and just use git to push the data and deploy that way?
I've used .war files and tomcat which is dead simple to deploy with the downside that there's no way to start swank-server (unless maybe disabling the security manager). Another downside is that .war files tend to be rather big.
Why use screen + emacs? Just recompiling things in emacs might probably introduce weird bugs as code is not removed from the system when it is removed from a source file. Seems a bit tough to manually go through all the source files in the right order and recompile them. It'd be easier IMHO to just start a swank server with every jetty started.