It's possible to get quit a lot accomplished by loosely coupling Ring+Compojure, Enlive/Hiccup, and datastore modules like Clutch, Korma, clj-orient, etc.
I began my journey into Clojure about a month ago (after poking at it since last Sept) by diving into the "Clojure Programming" book recently published by O'Reilly. After finishing the book, I reached for Noir to fill my web-dev needs, as the idea of a "batteries included" framework appealed to me. But I ended up dropping Noir and adopting the approach explained in the book, i.e. loosely coupling the modules mentioned above.
Noir itself is built from some of those same modules, and it seems like a fine open source project, but I've found that I'm better off connecting the "lego blocks" together manually -- it's not a complex exercise and gives you a lot of freedom to experiment, learn and fine tune.
