The time has come for us to officially announce the Immutant project. Immutant is going to be for Clojure what TorqueBox is for Ruby: a true, enterprise-grade application server, encapsulating the robust services provided by JBoss AS7 within intuitive Clojure API's.

Further, Immutant has inspired us to attempt to achieve a sort of "polyglot cafeteria plan" of app serving. For example, your "application" might consist of a Ruby web app in the front and Clojure data mining services in the rear, loosely but securely coupled via JSON-encoded asynchronous messages. You choose the JVM-based languages and frameworks that make the most sense for each of your application components. And Immutant will provide a uniform deployment platform and the "glue", i.e. those critical enterprisey services like messaging, security, transactions, clustering, etc. that all successful applications eventually require.

Why?

Because learning new programming languages is fun. Because no one language is good for everything a non-trivial application needs to do. Because JBoss wants to be "everywhere".

But mostly because we want to.

App servers get a bad rap -- and bad app servers deserve it -- but simple deployment, clustering and messaging are all good things. Embracing polyglot and enabling the choice of the right language/framework for a specific job is a good thing. We hope to deliver that goodness via Immutant.

An Invitation

We just got started with this, and though still Clojure noobs, we're learning fast. We have a lot to do, and we'd love to have you help shape Immutant into something that'll best serve your needs.

In the coming weeks, we'll be publishing more articles about Immutant, such as:

How to deploy your Clojure apps (hint: Leiningen plugin)

How to configure Immutant to serve both Ruby and Clojure apps

How to pass messages between Ruby and Clojure components

How to distribute Clojure message handlers across a cluster of immutants

Please follow along on Twitter, join the mailing lists and/or hang out with us on IRC. It'll be fun!