Is there anyone with knowledge about a project/git...

# announcements

[Philipp Mayer]

Is there anyone with knowledge about a project/github repository which makes some real use of kotlinx.html (not just hello world)?
Would love to look into that. Thanks!

[Hanno]

Even though it's not public, i implemented a prototypal rewrite of a real world administration webapp with react. I found the code to be pretty much what you have in hello world examples, but a lot more of that. Anything in particular you are interested in? Experience? Drawbacks or sth?

[Philipp Mayer]

Yeah, tell me a little bit about it!
How was it? Would you do it again? Was it more of an idealistic solution/idea, or is it quite practical?
I'm not even looking at it from a company point of view, I'm just building my own home automation tool and try to show/use as kotlin features that I can't use at work.
Right now, it's a vaadin frontend, but looking at kotlinxhtml/react/js looks obviously interesting!

[Hanno]

I quite enjoyed it! There's an intellij plugin that converts html to kotlin xhtml which gives you pretty much all the advantages you get with html syntax based techbologies like jsx. The tooling support makes abstraction and refactoring a joy. Readability is fine, but large templates and a lot of styling will be as demanding as in pure html. I think it's the best solution for any language that doesn't want to include html syntax. There are even proposals for an equivalent for typescript for tsx replacement, because people realize how much nicer it is :)

But this is only Part of the story, because you need to think about whether you use it from your backend (spring, ktor or whatever) or from the frontend. If you want pure frontend, then it would probably be the kotlin js react stack, which i was also very satisfied with, but it has some rough edges.

For personal projects, i recommend it every time. For production use, xhtml is fine, but the react kotlin stack needs some things fulfilled at your work :)

[Philipp Mayer]

Thanks for the insight!
Well, just to describe the frontend part of my hobby project:
A simple admin view which presents data and around 2 dialogs for settings.
I'm really intrigued to try it with kotlin react, but I'm not sure if it would be smarter to first learn react (I know the basic html/js/css and some angular, but nothing about react). Anyway, thanks again!

[Hanno]

I think with your given expertise, you just have to read a tutorial about react and than you can directly go to react kotlin. There is a hands on (google kotlin react handson) which is veeery beginner friendly and gets you going for a first working version within a day. Of course it would also be nice to just learn react with js, as it was meant to happen for a js framework, but tbh setting it up is much more hassle than kotlin js react with gradle If you are used to jvm tools already, and who has time to learn everything, right :)

[Philipp Mayer]

Sounds good. Thanks a lot!

[Hanno]

You are welcome, i hope you will have the same good experience as i had :)