core VS http4k

Reasonable people can disagree on licensing issues, and obviously they can give out grants under whatever conditions they like, but telling developers that JetBrains knows what license is best for your project's users seems intrusive to me. My project has almost 900 github stars, it's under the LGPL and in almost 7 years no user has ever asked for a less restrictive license.

Anyone interested could create a plugin for tailwind similar to this one for another CSS framework.

Kweb - A Kotlin web framework built on SSR (server side rendering)

User Manual: https://docs.kweb.io/book

Kweb is a novel web framework that acts as a remote interface to the web browser's DOM (Document Object Model). With Kweb, you can create and manipulate DOM elements and listen for and handle events, all using an intuitive Kotlin DSL that mirrors the structure of the HTML being created.

Kweb manages state through observable mutable values called kvars:

    import kweb.*

Github | User Manual | Release Notes

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