What’s your favourite Ktor + Frontend setup? Start...

# ktor

[arthur_sav]

What’s your favourite Ktor + Frontend setup?
Started with simple HTML/JS + Freemarker but it’s getting messy.

[Casey Brooks]

I’ve found that I don’t like using server-side rendered template engines mixed with frontend Kotlin/JS. I’ve found Kotlin/JS to “feel” the best when using it as a completely separate frontend app talking to the server purely over REST APIs (or to a lesser degree, websockets)

[arthur_sav]

So it’s not just me. Leaning towards a separate ReactJS frontend that talks to Ktor via REST.
Was hoping to somehow avoid JS but i guess we’re not there yet.

[Casey Brooks]

Alpine is an interesting approach that should place nicely with server-side rendering. Just add the script tag and everything else is just markup on normal HTML https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine

[Casey Brooks]

But overall, I’ve done a lot with SSR and I’ve generally found that it doesn’t make for a very great or polished front-end UX. It works, and for fast development, internal projects, or mostly-static content, it’s probably good enough. But to really get a snappy, responsive experience on the frontend, having some kind of decoupled client-rendered UI does feel better from a user’s perspective. Also makes it easier to integrate into a mobile app if you ever need to add that, as it would be talking to the same APIs that the web client uses

[arthur_sav]

Yeah depends on usage. My use case is more of an actual app, with user interactions / api calls / update parts of UI.

Was looking into KotlinJS wrappers but it’s still pretty new.

[Casey Brooks]

I’ve mostly been playing around with a pure-kotlin reactive approach based on Flow and kotlinx HTML, and am very pleased with it so far. Given how large the bundle is with kotlin alone, I’d like to avoid huge non-kotlin dependencies since Kotlin offers pretty much all i’d need anyway

[Casey Brooks]

In particular, the workaround in this issue (https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html/issues/88) makes it possible to get the underlying HTMLElement from any point in the kotlinx HTML DSL, so you can mount dynamic content to that one element and update it later with new content from a Flow, and not necessarily replace the entire screen on every small data change

[arthur_sav]

I’d hate to base my app on a hack 😁 specially if it’s not a toy project.

[holgerbrandl]

For simple web apps thymeleaf works great and has good ide support.