Intro

Artemis is a small library that helps you build GraphQL clients in ClojureScript. It’s heavily inspired and borrows many ideas from apollo-client, but it’s written entirely in ClojureScript and specifically designed to be used by ClojureSript applications.

Artemis relies on core.async to provide a model around the asynchronous nature of querying a GraphQL application and provides a set of protocols for extensibility.

The main objective of this library is to provide a simple way to execute GraphQL queries and mutations in pure ClojureScript. As such, it does not include any built-in integrations with popular view frameworks, such as Reagent or Rum. Instead, Artemis provides a consistent, predictable approach to accessing and updating GraphQL data that you can easily incorporate into your codebase, whatever that might look like.

Why Artemis

There are several JavaScript-based GraphQL libraries and using them from ClojureScript isn’t terribly difficult. However, we found a few problems with that approach:

First, it required writing a lot of interop code, which isn’t fun.

Second, GraphQL is a spec for accessing data. Accordingly, using a JavaScript library in Clojurescript meant constantly translating between Clojure data structures and JavaScript data structures, a costly endeavor.

We felt there was an opening for a ClojureScript library that allowed you to access GraphQL data without having to constantly dip in and out of JavaScript.

If you’re looking for a library writen entirely in ClojureScript that provides a consistent and simple approach to fetching and updating remote GraphQL data, while also caching and normalizing that data at the client-level, then Artemis might work for you.

Continue reading to see how it all works.