Hey guys, I have no experience with kotlin or java for web backends and I want to create one for my next KMM project. I’ve heard of “spring” and “apollo” are frameworks that could help and also ktor. But I don’t know what I’m doing and I could use some help getting started. I’ve done a bit with laravel php and node js in the past and that’s it for web backend programming but it’s something I’d really like to learn with kotlin.

Hey, Spring has a guide for Kotlin https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/

If you want to do sever-side programming the Kotlin way, then stay away from Spring (Boot), it's very Java-esque, employs a lot of "magic" often based off annotations. KTor --and Kotlin in general-- is very minimal on annotations, and is for me a lot easier to wrap my head around. Compared to Java, Kotlin adds some flexibilities (that do not sacrifice type-safety) which make it easier to express yourself in code concisely.

graphql-kotlin supports Spring Boot and Ktor (in version 7). You can do without most of the annotations using the Spring beans DSL. One example is here

maybe also

HTTP4K

could be a good starting point, at least for the http layer

Thanks everyone for the advice, I agree ktor and with graphql-kotlin seem like good routes to go. So how might I go about that exactly 😄