Even the prospect of doing something like that fro...

# http4k

[dave]

Even the prospect of doing something like that from a completely in memory test which ran in a few milliseconds in any other framework is - frankly - laughable. But with http4k - it's not just possible - it's actually fairly easy.

Personally, I take a look at the facilities provided for testing by every other similar library and believe in reality they are written as nothing more than an afterthought - testability was not seen as a core driver for the problem space*. And as Ivan mentioned - once you've this style of testing done well in practice, doing anything else just seems prehistoric.

That said, we're lucky that the Kotlin language dovetails nicely into this style - and I really believe the excellent fit of the language has made http4k even better. We have also been lucky to take http4k from project to project and then feed ideas back into it for next time - we are nothing if not lazy and hate repeating ourselves!

Overall, our style of software development is very counter to a lot of "popular" practice - everything from our use of monorepos to the obsession with testing to super light dependency apps to lack of mocking to the insistence on pairing and real Trunk Based Development (ie. delivering through tiny incremental commits with virtually no branches or PRs).

This all means we are very used to having to convince people of lots of other things as well - http4k is often the easy one! But we have found that when you put all these things together you get super-engaged development teams who are happy and confident in their delivery of software - every bug is an opportunity to improve your test suite and sleep better at night. And it's an amazing thing to see that transformation and know you were a part of it.

But you're right - it is often hard. Our lack of corporate backing is seen as a weakness. And the lack of http4k presence StackOverflow is often quoted as a problem - personally we think it's a feature!

Overall, http4k was created as a counter to 15 years of frustration with - well - everything else! It's a solution to the problems we had with modern HTTP app development and we are thrilled that other people also love using it.

*I'd love to be wrong about this!