Is there any way to use ktor as backend and vue as frontend? I foiund the singlePageApplication but it didn't seem to take a route argument, and it also seemed to require compiled files rather than being able to reload quickly.

you could just use a plain webpack setup for this, your vue frontend doesn’t need to know about the ktor backend afaik?

For the development setup you can use Vue’s dev server to serve your frontend and proxy all API requests to a backend (Ktor) https://cli.vuejs.org/config/#devserver-proxy.

So the only way to do it is by running two servers and some form of proxy, no way to do it with just ktor? What about production, how would I run the vue server from within a jar?

I’m not sure about the vue dev server, but I’m assuming it works like webpack 🙂 In dev, you run a server that recompiles code on the fly and automatically reloads code in the browser etc, In production, you pre-build minified JS files instead

How would I configure that in gradle/ktor?

for the webpack dev server you still point to a file on the file system, that webpack creates. This file contains the bare bones to connect to the webpack server that does the rest. So in both dev and prod, you link to the same “file”

I see, so I don't use singlePageApplication at all?

I’m not sure what singlePageApplication is, I’ve not used it at least 🙂

I suppose singlePageApplication also sets up a catch-all route that is served for all URLs etc, so maybe it’s a good idea to use it. And then also add a static route to serve the js

Hmm, that's not really desired, as different pages have different permissions and contents, so I'll just look into the vue stuff instead, though it seems to only generate a single file from what I can tell rather than one for each vue file.

so it’s not really a single page app, then?

If you develop a SPA then I would suggest having a separate frontend server for serving a static content and proxying requests to a backend server. Although, you can serve a static content in production with a Ktor server.

agreed! If I were to write an SPA today, I’d strongly consider going all in on something like next.js so you can get server-side rendering etc

so it’s not really a single page app, then?

The main problem is that all our backend devs want to work with kotlin/ktor and implement the frontend with pebble templates, but the frontend devs want to work with vue. I assumed a single-page-application was just a vue rendered page, is it not? I also haven't seen of a way to pass data to the vue templates for rendering, so that's something to look into as well.

Type safe data transfer between the backend, and frontend is one of the major advantages Kotlin has over JavaScript. Hypothetically if the OP were to use Kotlin for both the back and front ends then this advantage would be available.

Oh so there's no way to pass the data to the vue templates directly to also support javascript-disabled users?

as in, you want to run vue from Kotlin on the JVM for server side rendering?

I guess that'd be what I'm looking for, yeah

The OP is better off using a Kotlin JVM, or Kotlin Native based backend to do the server side rendering. Kotlin is far ahead of JS when it comes to server side rendering.

Well yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, but the frontend devs really want it to be Vue, so I don't know how to set this up as a single JVM process.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by single JVM process?

I think it’ll be tricky to render vue on the back-end 🤔