Why Use Ring?

Using Ring as the basis for your web application has a number of benefits:

• Write your application using Clojure functions and maps
• Run your application in a auto-reloading development server
• Compile your application into a Java servlet
• Package your application into a Java war file
• Take advantage of a large selection of pre-written middleware
• Deploy your application in cloud environments like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku

Ring is the current de facto standard base from which to write web applications in Clojure. Higher level frameworks such as Compojure, Moustache and Noir use Ring as a common basis.

Even though Ring provides only a low-level interface, it is useful to understand how it works even if you plan to use a higher-level interface. Without a basic understanding of Ring, you cannot write middleware, and you may find debugging your application more difficult.