Installation

Download the Fractl CLI tool and copy it to a location known to your system search-path, for e.g /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin.

hello, world

To make sure everything works fine, let's create a very simple Fractl program. Fractl programs are known as models, because they are very high-level descriptions of the problem being solved. First let's create a place to keep our models:

mkdir ~/fractl-models

Our first Fractl model is going to be very simple - it returns the message "hello, world". It's overkill to use a modelling language like Fractl to write a hello-world app, but that's good enough to test our installation and to familiarize ourselves with the basic developer workflow.

Create the directory ~/fractl-models/hello and add a file named model.fractl there. The contents of this file is shown below:

{:name :Hello
 :components [:Hello.Core]
 :fractl-version "current"}

All Fractl models must contain a model.fractl file to capture some basic information about the project. Two entries that must be provided here are the name of the model and the version of Fractl required to build and run it. The Fractl-version could be very specific like "0.4.6" or the string "current" - which basically tries to run the model using the active Fractl runtime.

A model is made up of components where all the data structures and business logic of the application is defined. The :Hello model contains a single component named :Hello.Core. To define it, first create the directory ~/fractl-models/hello/hello and add the following core.fractl file there:

(component :Hello.Core)

(record :Message
 {:Value :String})

(dataflow :SayHello
 {:Message {:Value "hello, world"}})

You can now run the model. From ~/fractl-models/hello execute the following command:

fractl run

Test the application using an HTTP post request like,

curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:8080/api/Hello.Core/SayHello' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{"Hello.Core/SayHello": {}}'

You should see the following response:

[
  {
    "status": "ok",
    "result": [
      {
        "type-*-tag-*-": "record",
        "-*-type-*-": [
          "Hello.Core",
          "Message"
        ],
        "Value": "hello, world"
      }
    ],
    "message": null
  }
]

Note To customize application logging, set the JDK_JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable as,
export JDK_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Dlogback.configurationFile=/path/to/logback.xml
You may download and reuse the logback.xml file that's available in the Fractl repository.

The :Hello model can be converted to a standalone Java application with the fractl build command. Before running the build command, make sure Leiningen is installed locally.

You can trigger the build as:

fractl build

Once the build is over, you'll find a standalone jar file under ./out/hello/target. The file name will be hello-0.0.1-standalone.jar. This can now be executed using the Java Virtual Machine,

cd ./out/hello
java -jar target/hello-0.0.1-standalone.jar -c config.edn

Use the previous HTTP POST request to make sure the application is working fine.

With Fractl setup and working properly, you can now explore the language further by proceeding to the Quick start guide.

Installation

hello, world​

hello, world