ktor VS http4k

Ktor, a powerful web framework built with Kotlin, offers a lightweight and flexible solution for building web applications. In this article, we will guide you through the process of creating a Ktor project manually using Gradle and SDKMAN!. By following the steps below, you'll have a basic Ktor project up and running in no time.

take a look at http4k and ktor for Kotlin specific frameworks Spring has first class support for Kotlin e.g. the following will give you reactive HTTP endpoints when using spring-webflux (this is what is use at work):

Ktor (Microservices framework by JetBrains)

For Android you should use a more mobile friendly framework like Retrofit or if you use Kotlin you can use the multi-platform Ktor library with it's client module

And last but not least, Ktor Client as our HTTP client. https://ktor.io/ It's a pretty amazing http client library and integrates well with Kotlinx serialization and Coroutines.

Kotlin is going to be great with almost every single JVM server. Spring works well with Kotlin, and is directly supported, but spring is also massive, very bloated. I recommend looking at https://github.com/ktorio/ktor which continues to serve all of my needs very well, integrates fantastically with Kotlin coroutines, and has very fast startup time and very good performance.

For the sake of the test, we use Ktor - the easiest way to do so is to use initializer.

I know you are looking for Spring Boot and/or Quarkus, but have you tried ktor. Just curios if you had a particular reason for choosing the other 2. Disclaimer: I haven't used ktor.

Check https://ktor.io it's from JetBrains and amazing.

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