Dimagog Blog

Making HTTP requests from ClojureScript with core.async

I’ve always been a big fan of async/await feature in C# (long before it was publicly available). So, naturally, I was very excited to read the announcement about Clojure core.async library. Even more so after I’ve learned that it works for ClojureScript as well.

Here is an example of using core.async to convert callback-based goog.net.XhrIo send API to sequential-looking one.

Leningen config (boring stuff)

Note: Code samples include only interesting parts, full source code is available below.

(defproject ...
  :repositories {
    "sonatype-oss-public" "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/groups/public/"
  }
  :dependencies [
    [org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"]
    [org.clojure/clojurescript "0.0-1820"] 
    [org.clojure/core.async "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"]
  ...

We need Sonatype because it is hosting SNAPSHOTs, and there is no release version of core.async available yet. Also I’m not using the latest version of ClojureScript because Light Table does not like it.

Defining GET function (cool stuff)

First the ns header:

(ns app
  (:require
    [goog.net.XhrIo :as xhr]
    [cljs.core.async :as async :refer [chan close!]])
  (:require-macros
    [cljs.core.async.macros :refer [go alt!]]))

It’s not idiomatic to have all uppercase function names in Clojure, but since this function mimics http GET method we’ll make an exception for it.

The idea is to return a channel from GET function that will have a result of send call when it completes. The callback simply extracts the result and writes it to the channel:

(defn GET [url]
  (let [ch (chan 1)]
    (xhr/send url
              (fn [event]
                (let [res (-> event .-target .getResponseText)]
                  (go (>! ch res)
                      (close! ch)))))
    ch))

We create channel ch of size 1 (default is 0) because there is no reason to block callback until reader arrives. Instead it writes the response once it becomes available and disappears.

You may think that callback could be simplified as:

; WARNING: Broken code
              (fn [event]
                (go (>! ch (-> event .-target .getResponseText))
                    (close! ch)))))

but that does not work. This version tries to extract result from event inside go routine which will execute eventually. By the time it runs event does not have the result anymore.

Also it’s a good idea to close! the channel ch after we write the result res, so if anyone tries to read from ch again by mistake, they will get nil returned immediately.

Using GET function (even cooler stuff)

Let’s define a helper log function first:

(defn log [s]
  (.log js/console (str s))))

And now we can call our GET function and print the result:

(go
  (log (<! (GET "http://dimagog.github.io/sitemap.txt"))))

We have sequential-looking code that looks like it’s blocking, but it’s not. It is fully asyncronous!

Source code

Full source code can be found on GitHub.

If you want to build and run it locally, execute:

git clone https://github.com/Dimagog/AsyncGET.git
cd AsyncGET
lein ring server
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Published

12 July 2013
by Dmitry Kakurin

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