Returning after a long absence (Incanter and Clojure version 1.2)

It's been five months since I last did anything in Clojure. What has changed?

Much to my relief my pom.xml file still produces a working version of clojure which I can connect to from emacs using:

$ mvn clojure:swank
and M-x slime-connect from emacs.

Now the first thing I want to do, with Clojure being a bit of a moving target, is to find out what the latest versions of everything are.

I'll use maven's versions plugin to find out. Add this snippet to the pom file.


      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>versions-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
      </plugin>


$ mvn versions:display-plugin-updates

$ mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

[INFO] The following dependencies in Dependencies have newer versions:
[INFO]   org.clojure:clojure ............................... 1.1.0 -> 1.2.0-RC2
[INFO]   org.clojure:clojure-contrib ....................... 1.1.0 -> 1.2.0-RC2
[INFO]   swank-clojure:swank-clojure .................. 1.2.0-SNAPSHOT -> 1.2.1

So it looks like clojure's gone up a version, which is about to be released.

$ mvn versions:use-latest-versions

updates these in the pom automatically

$ mvn clojure:swank

now causes a certain amount of downloading....

and rather remarkably, everything still seems to work.

Slime says, on connecting: Versions differ 2010-02-01 (slime) vs 2009-09-14, which is interesting since swank-clojure was one of the things updated, and 14th September last year isn't very recent.

The first thing I want to look at is incanter, so I go to http://clojars.org and search for incanter. Clojars tells me that the maven snippet should be


    <dependency>
      <groupId>incanter</groupId>
      <artifactId>incanter</artifactId>
      <version>1.2.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>


So I add that to my pom.xml

$ mvn clojure:swank

Now causes a lot of downloading... including clojure-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT and clojure-contrib-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT, which are presumably dependencies of incanter. I wonder how different they are from the release candidates?

At any rate the server starts, so (I've never used incanter), I'll try the first test I find when googling:


; SLIME 2010-02-01
user>
user> (use '(incanter core charts))
nil
user> (view (function-plot sin -4 4))

And up pops a very nice graph.

I must say, that was all a lot easier than I was expecting!