Learning a new technology is much more fun when you actually have a mission. So I decided to make a little web app that can show the departure times of streetcars in Toronto.
This is possible because the City of Toronto has made the NextBus API available as part of its Open Data initiative, which provides info about routes, stop locations and arrival time predictions.
More info at http://stefan.arentz.ca/finding-your-way-home-with-clojure.html
To run this app in development mode you will need to have Leiningen 2.0 installed. Then you can just do:
$ cd departures-board
$ lein ring server-headless
The dashboard will run on http://localhost:3000/index.html
You can also create a war file and then drop it in a servlet container like Tomcat or even JBoss.
$ cd departures-board
$ lein ring uberwar
$ cp target/departures-board-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.war $DEPLOYMENT_DIR/
The app has just one file system dependency: it needs to be able to create a ~/.departures-board directory where it will store route information.