Spring boot works well with Kotlin

https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/ is a very good tutorial

I just feel that Spring Boot is a bit overkill

In my current project we are using https://ratpack.io/ with Kotlin

some people are using Dropwizard with Kotlin

If your use case is sufficiently simple you’ll do reasonably well whatever you select

Thanks, that's true, it is very simple and only for a small dev util, so nothing important. I will probably use sparkjava or javalin with khttp.

There's also #ktor.

@Kenneth if you're particularly worried about overkill then a certain framework I know of has zero dependencies in the core (and weighs in at ~700kb). Here's an echo server..

val app = { request: Request -> Response(OK).body(request.body) }
val server = app.asServer(SunHttp(8000)).start()

😃

the sparkjava framework has tried to be more kotlin friendly https://github.com/perwendel/spark-kotlin

yep

but I use Maven setup

with the spring kotlin compiler plugin

FWIW we used to do Spring Boot development and we've since switched to Ratpack.. and it's a relief.

Much more lightweight, much less stuff I never need getting in the way

I've made my professional mantra that I would rather solve my own problems than my framework's, and Spring was one of the leading drivers for it.

I'm not saying Spring is crap, I fully allow the option we were not 'doing it right', maybe most of it is down to personal preference.. but I am happy not to be working with it anymore (well, we still support old projects, but for the new stuff at least).

Same here, however we switched to jooby.org and could finally focus again, however that was pre Spring Boot 2.0 and I am open for giving it another go in a future project.

I need some of the stuff - but I just pull in some of my libraries and configure them. It's not that much work and it functions just the way I want and if anything goes wrong I can debug it.

Pac4j for authentication, jOOQ for database access and so on..

The work I put into setting up each is roughly comparable to a medium-complicated oops that you get with the framework (where you don't know how to exactly set something up, or two components interact in the wrong way)

..but while I tend to have multiple oopses with Spring Boot components, especially as the components pile up, I just pay the setup cost once here and I'm done

and whatever you learn can easily be transferred to your next project.. with spring(boot) you just learn spring things.

..it's true that onboarding new developers who've worked with Spring Boot is easier (most of them have, if they're from the Java ecosystem), so win some lose some..

Coming from Ratpack again, they've made a conscious choice not to support plugins in their framework. Plugin integration (or whatever spring boot calls them) can be a major source of bugs, unexpected behaviours and upgrade woes. Ratpack provides some integrations with external libraries but it mostly comes in the form of static methods that use the same public API you, the developer, are using to program. So you have only one API to learn and if something goes wrong or you want to use another product, it's fairly straightforward to do.

I have to say I like that decision a lot.

You guys make valid points. Maybe I am just experiencing sunk cost fallacy.

getting on mockk tonight, but in the meantime, I'm checking what's going on with my heroku deployment

This is an issue I have run into consistently for both testing, docker, and deployment, all related to the fact that there is difficulty locating the main class

Because the main class in Kotlin Spring Boot requires the main class to be independent of an actual class, I'm a little unclear of what I should be doing