http4k VS initializr

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

The best way, for generating a ready-to-run application in Java you can use the Spring Boot Initializr tool.

curl --location 'https://start.spring.io/starter.zip?type=maven-project&language=java&bootVersion=3.2.2&baseDir=ms-xcoffee&groupId=com.xcoffee&artifactId=ms-xcoffee&name=ms-xcoffee&description=Demo%20project%20for%20Spring%20Boot&packageName=com.xcoffee.ms-xcoffee&packaging=jar&javaVersion=21&dependencies=webflux%2Clombok%2Cvalidation' | tar -xzvf -

In this segment we will create a basic Spring boot app from Spring Initializer. Add the below dependencies:

Add the following MongoDB dependencies in your pom.xml or use spring initializer and select the Spring Data MongoDB dependency:

I created all of these applications using start.spring.io's REST API and HTTPie.

An easy way to create the skeleton project is to visit Spring Initializr, I set the Project to Gradle - Groovy, Language to Java, and add Spring Web dependency. Then it's just to generate the project and unpack it.

Create a new Spring Boot application using the Spring Initializr. You can use the web version or the curl command below. Use the default for most of the options. For the dependencies, select web, and okta. For the build tool, select Gradle.

I will start with a simple example of a cloud function, which is the same as a rest endpoint in the classical spring boot web application. You can create a project from your favorite IDE or from Spring Initliazr.