hello everyone 🙂 I am attempting to make with kotlin a desktop application that listens to port(s) for messages and returns responses (i.e. input output). It will only be handling requests from host user (from web browser). This seems like a tcp/ip application. I want to make this as lightweight as possible. From these requirements, ktor seems like possibly overkill for library choice . Using a jetty (not netty) or cio (avoiding http layer) seems like the most lightweight options . But maybe I should avoid ktor all together because it would be great to not use a servlet. My first solution (for mvp) was just a while loop that listens for messages on ports, and then I deserialized with code I wrote, etc. So what I am looking for is a library that could do this (that I wont have to maintain, and is hopefuly better then just a while loop) that does not use a servlet (because It is over kill)

Http4k has a small 1 MB core module and can use the

SunHttp

server built into the java runtime. Might be worth looking into! https://www.http4k.org/blog/nanoservices/

We use sunhttp for low traffic servers for logging in CLI callbacks

thanks @Andrew O'Hara and @dave

I recommend vert.x if you want something low level

@christophsturm would vert.x not be best suited for cloud / real distributed servers? not just a single node desktop server/application

you said you are currently using a while loop so vertx with its event loop could be just perfect. and its not a huge library, sure it its mostly for servers but good performance is always great on the client 🙂

ok this is an interesting choice, definately will look into it and do some performance comparisons with simple example