sorry couldn’t resist

Speaking of Spring, I am kicking off a new web app with Kotlin on the server and I am investigating Spring. I have never used it. As far as I can tell, it looks like a supersized DI framework. Given that the new app is going to be small, am I wasting my time looking at Spring?

spring (and spring boot) is not a monolith there are modules you can use only the DI ones but can add the one that makes sense for you since probably you’ll be using a database i can only warmly recommend having a look at spring data which lets you easily access data in a crud way if your requirements are simple you don’t even need to code implementations it’s really good and very nicely integrated with kotlin especially spring boot 2/spring 5 there’s a #spring channel by the way

any advantages of choosing dropwizard over spring?

shrug “backed by a big company” isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be

people choose it over spring when it fits their needs or development strategies

dw is batteries-included-but-optional, and it’s really easy to do things differently when you need to

One of my criteria to pick software is a lot more bloat vs/ features I need than size of the backer

DropWizard is a fine server, there are quite a few. At the end of the day, web servers are a dime a dozen, they’re definitely a commodity today. As long as they provide basic things like SSL, websockets and interceptors, you can probably do anything you need with them

If the service you are developing is sufficiently small, Dropwizard would do great, in some ways better than Spring since it has fewer moving parts. Once your service becomes big enough you are likely to run into cases where something you need is provided by Spring, but requires integration of some 3rd party lib with Dropwizard. That’s doable, but once those cases become too many, it becomes a maintenance nightmare.

My position regarding JVM frameworks is: unless you have a specific reason to do something different, choose Spring. It might not be the best solution for all cases, but it’s unlikely to be much worse than alternatives and the cost of figuring out what’s best might very well be higher than the value gain.

I like Dropwizard because it has less magic, and the internals are a lot more approachable if you need to customize stuff. But mostly I’m just more familiar with it which is why we ended up going that way. Most people use spring and it certainly has more resources available. I think it is hard to go wrong with either one, but Spring is probably a sane default

You can also try using gRPC route instead of going the rest route

vert.x is intimidating and is doing a lot more than serving JSON

then again, you could say the same of Spring

but yes, I default to DropWizard because it has the right amount of starting material that I understand without going crazy in various dimensions

does dropwizard come with official kotlin support?

googling 'dropwizard kotlin' gives some old github examples.

I mean, what would official kotlin support even entail in this case?

they don’t make any guarantees on supporting every kotlin feature or library, but then again, they don’t make many guarantees at all

(I am new to kotlin)

I mean. I don’t know much about computers, but afaik it doesn’t really make a difference unless the library had reason to take advantage of kotlin-specific features

for individual components of Dropwizard there’s some Kotlin-specific tooling

Jackson has a kotlin data class module that installs really easily - just include it in your POM and register the module like normal

Dropwizard works pretty well out of the box with kotlin without anything special, the jackson module is the only major thing that you really need to add in addition, unless you are bringing in 3rd party libraries

JDBI3 brings Kotlin support in as well, but you’ll need to either bring that artifact in separately or include the release-candidate

dropwizard-jdbi3

Yes, the new jdbi 3 is actually super nice with kotlin. I was iffy on JDBI before, but now we are using it instead of hibernate for new projects

@m So far, DropWizard is working just fine with Kotlin (then again, why wouldn't it? 🙂 )

Wonder if I can coerce it in using Klaxon instead of Jackson though

@m https://grpc.io/