Introduction

In the last chapter, we built our application layer and interacted with it via the REPL. This works sufficiently well for a single user performing ad hoc interactions, but it does not scale. Indeed, we could imagine a scenario where a third party or even another of our own services wants to make use of the data stored in our database, perform calculations, and persist updates. This interaction would be programmatic and would, therefore, benefit from being exposed over HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or similar.

We can achieve this by exposing our application layer via a web service. A web service allows interaction with our application layer over a network (most typically the internet, although it could be over an intranet for private applications).

To build our web service, we'll need a web application library to build our API, a web server to serve it up over HTTP, and a routing library to route incoming requests to the appropriate handler. Clojure has...