Chapter 4. URL Routing and Template Rendering

So far, we've looked at the basics of getting our codebase into a state where we can start developing some of the meat of our application. It hasn't been very exciting, I know. In this chapter, however, we will start building our application, creating actual endpoints that process HTTP requests, which return something we can look at. In this chapter, we will:

• Learn what the Compojure routing library is and how it works
• Build our own Compojure routes to handle an incoming request
• Learn what the Selmer rendering library is and how it works
• Create our own Selmer HTML template

  Note

  What this chapter won't cover, however, is making any of our HTML pretty, client-side frameworks, or JavaScript. Our goal is to understand the server-side/Clojure components and get up and running as quickly as possible. As a result, our templates are going to look pretty basic, if not downright embarrassing.