http4k VS HikariCP

You named Express as an example for a good framework - I'd say both http4k and ktor come close to it. Spring Boot would really be on the other end and I met lots of JS/TS devs that didn't even want to touch it. I did have the same impression than you though: Documentation for ktor is not great at all.

http4k has excellent documentation and very simple concepts.

I couple of years ago I was lucky to use http4k, a server as a function web library for Kotlin. It was such a wonderful change compared to every other technologies available in both Java and Kotlin. It's simple.

Testing becomes so much easier too, as one can instantiate a the whole web routing aspect, without having to bind it to a port and having to send real http requests.

If strongly suggest people to take a look at it. It's not perfect, but it's a lot simpler than other frameworks and libraries. And it's a shift in some of the current mentality of using heavy frameworks (such as spring boot) which blow up anyone's cognitive load.

https://github.com/http4k/http4k

http4k with the contract, format-jackson, and server-undertow modules

Looks like HikariCP is also awaiting fixes for this https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/pull/2055

I have used hikari and exposed to do this in the past with postgres, although other dialects are supported.

I found one suggestion from the author of HikariCP on how to address this, which I implemented and it worked. However, there are additional classes involved, and it feels a little clunky and hard to follow.

Not really, you can change some things in spring boot but doing so will typically trigger a refresh which is less reliable than restarting but still causes a large performance hit. You could probably do it with hikari if you really needed to but it's inadvisable to build your application around this mechanic.

# https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-Sizing

Not familiar with Python but this thread about a Java connection pool might be interesting: https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-Sizing

Whatever you choose, presuming your app is database heavy, I highly recommend spending time on DB schema design to make all queries as short as possible, avoid relying on transactions, and keep your connection pool tiny. For reference: https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-Sizing

You reminded me of the HikariCP library and it’s documentation: Clear and simple with references to other libraries trying to accomplish the same thing. It is not in the closure space though.

https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP