I spent a little time today messing with date pickers for my eventual single-page app, and wound up with something general enough that it seemed worthwhile packaging it as a library.

To wit, I published cljs-pikaday, a ClojureScript interface to the Pikaday JavaScript date-picker. So far it just has a reagent interface, but I still plan to add an Om interface and a re-frame interface, at least. You can see an online demo at github.

After having worked with a lot of websites spawned from lein new templates in the recent past, I found the eventual project.clj file for the library to be shockingly small. It winds up being very easy to publish a library on clojars (as a caveat, I still need to test the published artifact in a separate project to make sure I didn’t mess everything up – I know my published jar has an extraneous directory in it, for one thing). I found the easiest way to develop the library was by starting with a lein new reagent template, getting the basic functionality to work, and then moving the generated stuff into its own template, save the actual library files.

The interface itself seems to be adequate for my needs, if not perfect. You can basically pass arbitrary atoms in to the pikaday/date-selector component and have the date-picker synchronized with the atom, so that user selection updates the atom and atom updates change the selected date of the picker.

I’m still puzzling over what a humane re-frame interface would look like. One could easily dispatch methods using the existing callback interface, but I’m not really sure what the best way to express subscriptions that the picker should listen to is.