http4k VS kotlinx.html

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

1 Clone this repo https://github.com/tom-delalande/html-to-kotlin-converter and open in intellij 2 In the root of that project folder, create input.txt and add the component/html that you want to convert (feel free to pick a component from tailwind), run main in that project and it'll be converted to kotlin ktor html DSL in output.txt (basically, that's the readme of that project lol) 3 in your ktor project (make sure you already added ktor-html from kotlin team), respond to a route like so

As for the strange infix syntax, you're correct - it's not important (for Dart anyway). Kotlin supports writing code that have DSL like syntax making things like typesafe HTML or Jetpack Compose possible.

I'm not familiar with JavaEE/JSP so I cannot really answer that, why do these technologies need a special IDE? Does JSP even make sense with Kotlin? If I was stuck with JSP I'd probably use Java since that's what JSP was made for. Kotlin has other solutions like https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html

Html DSL in Kotlin. See it on Github.

If so, and if they don't provide an easy way to set a font family list, you may have to escape into a raw block: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html/wiki/Style-and-script-tags

You might like to leave a comment here, someone requested svg support in the Kotlin HTML dsl https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html/issues/144

Thanks for sharing, I really like projects like this. And the website is really informative.

I find it less of a new language and more of a JS preprocessor, removing lots of the cruft and integrating XML-tags and CSS in a very neat way.

What I miss:

1) I feel the web is shifting to more type checking. TS, Elm, Kotlin.js... I personally also prefer more typesafety, especially if the project grows in LOC/team size.

2) Compared to JSX, Imba does a much better job in integrating adjacent technologies. Though I much prefer these to be integrated in an eDSL fashion. For example how Elm does HTML templating (in Elm) or Kotlinx.html[1].

Just taste i guess. Good luck with yr project!

[1]: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html

I do use kotlinx.html and while there is a lack of the documentation about the tags, most of them are already implemented (as far as I know they are automatically generated) and the ones that aren't automatically generated can be implemented manually in your own project.