hexagon VS javalin

Hexagon is a Microservices Toolkit that aims to provide all you need to develop applications that run on Cloud environments.

Ktor is a project that's not primarily focused on application performance but developer performance. It seems to be sth different than what you want to achieve. I don't think a lot frameworks... or any other framework writes its own low level io stuff from scratch, they mostly use https://netty.io/ because there's not too much room for improvement and it's complete, battle tested and so on. I lately came across https://github.com/hexagonkt/hexagon which seems to have a very solid code base based on modules modules modules, is kotlin first and they have an adapter for netty. The usage of the naked http server seems to be as easy as it can be https://hexagonkt.com/port_http_server/port_http_server/ and they are even listed on techempower benchmarks https://github.com/hexagonkt/hexagon/ .

https://github.com/hexagonkt/hexagon A microservices toolkit written in Kotlin.

If you've read this far, you might be interested to know that Javalin has been offering Brotli compression through jvm-brotli for three years already, and that there have been no (reported) issues. In other words, the effort required to release and maintain this is probably not huge.

I'm a big fan of Ktor (ktor.io) but another reasonable lightweight alternative is Javelin (https://javalin.io/). Heck even Spring Boot isn't that bad. HikariCP + JooQ (has both java and kotlin codegen) for DB access if you need and you're good to go.

A similar alternative that does not rely on web sockets is https://htmx.org. I have greatly enjoyed using it with some simpler web frameworks like https://javalin.io to do some prototyping and smaller projects. I'm sure if someone made a plug and play UI library like material UI for Angular on top of htmx you could absolutely fly through MVPs.

Javalin

If you're already familiar with most of the concepts around HTTP and web services, I'd recommend using something like https://javalin.io/ which is light weight frame work that makes getting something up and running quickly a very easy task.

I've been looking at https://javalin.io/ Seems close enough to express and some big names are using it, so I wouldn't say it's fizzling out

Javalin (https://javalin.io) is strongly inspired by Express and Koa, so you should feel right at home:

If you want to do a proper comparison between the two, I would be happy to help with code examples from Javalin's side. I could even host it on https://javalin.io as a "Comparison to Jooby" blog post.