Clojure Data Browsers

Clojure has a strong focus on using the built in data structures (list, vector, hash-map, set) to represent information in the system. Tools to inspect data and browse through nested or large data sets is invaluable in understanding what the system is doing.

There are many clojure.core functions that can be used to explore data structures and transform them to produce specific views on data.

tap> and datafy are recent additions to Clojure that provide a more elegant way of exploring data than the classic println statement.

New tools are being created to capture and visualize results from evaluated expressions (REBL, Reveal) as well as tools to specifically visualize tap> expressions (Reveal, Portal).

Common approaches

• Editor data browsers - e.g. cider-inspect
• Portal - tool to navigate and visualise data via tap>
• Clojure inspector - built-in Java Swing based inspector
• Reveal repl with data browser, also a tap> source (semi-commercial project)