day8/re-frame

re-frame is a framework for building web applications in ClojureScript, which is a dialect of Clojure that compiles to JavaScript so it can run in a browser. It is primarily aimed at developers building single-page applications, which are web apps that load once and update their content dynamically without reloading the page. The framework has been around since 2014 and describes itself as mature and stable. The README notes it has been used by small startups as well as organizations with hundreds of developers, and has powered production codebases of 40,000 lines or more. The authors make a point of highlighting this longevity as an advantage, contrasting it with the frequent churn of new JavaScript tools and patterns. At its core, re-frame is built around a one-way data flow model. Application state lives in one central place. Events trigger changes to that state, and views are purely reactive, meaning they only display what the state contains rather than managing logic themselves. This approach keeps the code organized and predictable, especially as an application grows. The framework uses React under the hood through another library called Reagent, but it treats React as just the layer responsible for rendering visuals, not as the organizer of application logic. The project is released under the MIT license. Documentation lives on an external site rather than in the repository itself. A Slack channel exists for community support. The README also mentions a diagnostic and debugging guide for developers who want to inspect application behavior during development, including tools for tracing events and validating subscriptions. This is a developer tool intended for people writing ClojureScript. It is not an end-user application.