"One thing that bugs me with most of the clojure web frameworks that I have looked at is that they a. use ant instead of maven ..."
Wouldn't it be better still to use something that is, and uses, Clojure?
One thing (among many) that I like about using JRuby is that I can use Ruby for config files and admin tasks. It may be a JVM language but I shouldn't have to use Java tools for routine tasks.
Yes it would be better. The 2 key issues that maven solves for me is depencency management (specify which version of jar you need) and a consistent build enviroment across projects. Maven sucks in a lot of aspects mainly because it's rather opaque compared to ant -- hard to know what it actually does.
Providing a maven build will make it trivial for anyone with maven installed to build a project, making it easier to adopt clojure project in an organization that uses a lot of java.
"Providing a maven build will make it trivial for anyone with maven installed to build a project, making it easier to adopt clojure project in an organization that uses a lot of java."
No doubt true, but the other side is that folks like me who barely know what Maven is, and would prefer to not do a lot of Java, are put off from trying Clojure (or certain Clojure tools and libs) because it appears too married to Java tools.
Sort of like telling people that to use Rails they first need to use autoconf or something because Ruby is C under the hood.
I understand what you mean and I can respect not wanting to dig too deep into java, we are talking about two different things here I think development and deployment. autoconf is great for someone who just wants to install something from source as simple as possible, it is also consistent across projects, making it a nobrainer to install with. I would love to have a simpler environment in clojure, it not even trivial to start the repl.
Wouldn't it be better still to use something that is, and uses, Clojure?
One thing (among many) that I like about using JRuby is that I can use Ruby for config files and admin tasks. It may be a JVM language but I shouldn't have to use Java tools for routine tasks.