nbb brings clojure scripting to nodejs environments. Although we’ve been building clojurescript programs for nodejs for a while now, nbb is different.

• cljs files are never compiled to js (nbb is an interpreter). If you’re making a serverless function, or a script, the cljs files are packaged.
• macros are not evaluated at compile time, as in clojurescript. This feels more natural if you’re accustomed to clojure.
• easy to require and use npm packages
• simple and intuituive repl experience

I decided to try this out with a @google-cloud module. Create an npm project with the following.

npm install -g nbb
mkdir nbb-test
cd nbb-test
npm init -y
npm install @google-cloud/language
npx nbb nrepl-server

Start an editor and connect your repl. Create an app.cljs file with the contents below and evaluate the namespace.

(ns app
  (:require [clojure.pprint :refer [pprint]]
            [promesa.core :as p]
            ["@google-cloud/language" :as language]))

(def language-client (new (.-LanguageServiceClient language)))

(p/catch
  (p/then 
    (.analyzeSentiment 
      language-client 
      #js {:document #js {:content "I am not angry" :type "PLAIN_TEXT"}}) 
    #(pprint (js->clj %)))
  #(println %))

This will fail if your nodejs session can not authenticate. The @google-cloud/language module will search your local environment for application-default credentials, so it’s straight forward to login using gcloud. Once you’ve logged in, you can evaluate your namespace above again, and you should see a sentiment analysis result from GCP.

gcloud auth application-default login
npx nbb app.cljs

This assumes that the Natural Language apis are enabled in your current gcloud google project.

Incidentally, this is the same as running the following gcloud command.

gcloud ml language analyze-sentiment --content="I am not angry"