:loudspeaker: Do you use Kotlin for backend develo...

# announcements

[Alina Dolgikh [JB]]

📢 Do you use Kotlin for backend development?

We’re launching the Kotlin for Server-Side Content Creators campaign to recognize good content and share it with the Kotlin community. Whether it’s a blog post, video, or project, we want to promote your work.

What to share?
✅ Your journey exploring Kotlin for backend development
✅ Migration stories from Java backends to Kotlin
✅ Tutorials on building with Ktor or Spring Boot in Kotlin
✅ Practical tips for Kotlin server-side development

👉 Learn more: kotl.in/2ygmbv

[Piotr Krzemiński]

it feels good to see it! some people still think Kotlin = Android 🙂 and it's so much more

[Valentino]

Where do I can find content about backend development with K?

[Deepak Nulu]

I would love to hear about backend efforts that use Kotlin-native instead of Kotlin-JVM. I am hoping Kotlin-native can one day replace Golang on the backend 🙂 I asked a while ago on #C3SGXARS6 about performance of Kotlin-native on the backend vs Golang, but I did not get any responses. I get the sense that Kotlin-native is mainly for frontend right now.

[Manuel Bogner]

I’ve switched our Java-based backend development to Kotlin about 5 years ago. Still JVM based with Spring Boot and some Quarkus since last year but since then our mobile and backend devs have been sharing the same language. Though that advantage didn’t benefit us a lot because backend and Android don’t have much more than the language and gradle in common now. But still the advantages of Kotlin helped us a enormously to improve our code quality. Null-safety is worth much more than this slight compile speed advantage of Java over Kotlin. And for Java devs the switch to Kotlin was no issue at all.

Regarding Kotlin Native I did some tests but ran into problems because you need to stay within certain boundaries to be able to use it. For example reflection and therefor everything aop is problematic. Bootup time and memory footprint of such native applications gave me the feeling of Go or C programs. But with Spring Boot and a dbms in the background I don’t think it is worth it. Bootup time for an API was never a problem for us with Spring Boot.

[Arivnd Ramesh]

This is great. We started using Kotlin server-side a few years ago, and it's gained widespread adoption at my company. Almost all new backend services are in Kotlin, and dev satisfaction is very high around it

[Deepak Nulu]

@Manuel Bogner thank you for the info about your experience with Kotlin-native on the backend!

[Oğuzhan Soykan]

Great news!
We’re moving from Java to Kotlin for all new backend projects. To make this transition smoother, we built Stove, a testing framework that helps Java developers start writing Kotlin code naturally.
Developers begin by writing end-to-end tests in Kotlin for their existing Java services, all integrated through Gradle. This gives them practical Kotlin experience before converting production code. What’s better is our Kotlin developers love using Stove for testing too!
The framework is open source at github.com/Trendyol/stove, and I had written our approach in a Medium article (little outdated)

[Bruno Medeiros]

@Deepak Nulu I'm using Kotlin/Native for one of my services that need a smaller memory footprint, so far it's working well. I'll probably share something in the coming months about it, but hit me up if you have any specific questions

[Bruno Medeiros]

I have been using Kotlin/JVM for backend development since 2016, never started a new Java service since then and have been migrating backend code from Java to Kotlin since then (in 3 different companies so far). Very satisfying journey!

[Deepak Nulu]

Thanks @Bruno Medeiros ! No specific questions at the moment. I have to use golang in the backend at the company I am at right now. Usually memory footprint and startup time is the justification for choosing it. Kotlin is a much better language and it would be great to be able to counter with it. I look forward to your more detailed write up.

Are you planning to compare (performance, startup time, memory footprint) with golang in your writeup?

[Bruno Medeiros]

I was thinking talking more about the experience, pros/cons, etc. My service has a lot of business logic so I wouldn't be able to write the same thing in Go to compare

[Abhilash Mandaliya]

apologies for the dumb question, but does it have to be an open-source project? we have cool projects but they aren't open source.

[Alina Dolgikh [JB]]

@Abhilash Mandaliya I think it's possible to share something event if the project is not open-source

[Abhilash Mandaliya]

Thanks, Alina. I will check with the team and see how can we participate 🙂

[Joe Boudreau]

I've started writing some Kotlin content on my blog (which I built with Ktor). Not much so far but here's a fairly specific article I wrote recently about Multipart requests: https://flowtwo.io/post/handling-multipart-requests-with-ktor-new

[João Esperancinha]

I do use Kotlin for back-end development aka server-side development both professionally and personally and I love it. Kotlin is pretty much a very interesting and exciting language since I discovered it in 2019. K. I also use it for my Android applications at the moment, but that is only on a personal level.