Hello everyone. I am choosing between Spring Boot...

# ktor

[Ehtesham Shahzad]

Hello everyone.

I am choosing between Spring Boot and Ktor for a project. With time, this project will scale to a large scale project. My question is: is Ktor ready and suitable for large scale projects (with evolving requirements)? Or should I go with Spring Boot?

[CLOVIS]

I haven't used Spring Boot, but I've used Ktor for a few small/medium projects, and it's really convenient. The best part is that, because you can also use it for the client-side, you can use multiplatform technologies with KotlinX.Serialization so your API is in shared code between the client and the server.

In my projects, whenever I had a change in requirements, I could just refactor the API in IDEA, and it would rename everything on the client side and the server side. That has been really convenient to use.

[Matteo Mirk]

They’re two different frameworks. Ktor is for creating HTTP clients and servers, while Spring is an enormous ecosystem, consisting of many projects. If you generally mean Spring as in “Spring IoC Container + Spring MVC/Flux” then Ktor roughly overlaps the latter. If you need also an IoC container, you’ll have to use something like Dagger 2 or Koin. Ktor has a much narrower scope with respect to Spring, but it is very configurable, doesn’t force you into its conventions, and plays well with whatever other components you want to add.

Now for the biased part: I’ve been working with Spring for many years in Java and I despise it, so I’ll say: go with ktor! 😉