:mega: Can you folks share what you like most abo...

# ktor

[orangy]

📣 Can you folks share what you like most about Ktor, and what least? Just one-two sentences in a thread. Thinking about what to highlight in the release blog post.

[mp]

It's unopinionated, extensible, and has good support for testing. Also, coroutines!

Edit: Oh, and what I like the least: the pipeline structure is sometimes difficult to work with, but most things I've needed to do have worked out. I'm using ktor in production, but my traffic numbers aren't interesting -- low volume, specialized product 🙂

[russhwolf]

I've only used the http client and none of the server-side stuff, so my experience is somewhat limited
like most: It's a Kotlin-first solution, which means it takes full advantage of things like DSL syntax, coroutines, and multiplatform. This both makes it neat to use, and makes it a great showcase for styles and idioms that we can use in our own code.
like least: Some of the configuration can feel a little too "magical" to me, where I worry that it's hard to intuit about things. For example, the way JsonFeature automatically grabs a default serializer based on what gradle includes you have. But maybe that's because I don't have much experience with it yet.

[mp]

^ seconded that -- I dislike automatic "we scanned your classpath and started using whatever we found" approaches.

[mp]

(A library I'm using unfortunately manages to depend on jackson 1, jackson 2, gson, AND org.json all at the same time. I don't want any clever logic deciding for me what to use; I want to explicitly define which json library is the right one.)

[vonox7]

a) Extensibility: In Ktor it is easy to add features even when a feature is not built-in. e.g. ignoring in a specific route all calls that come from a specific useragent, in our case API-calls from a released android app with broken API calls.
b) Stability and Performance: We use Ktor since 0.2.4 (februar 2017) in production. We handle since then continously 3000 - 4000 request / minute on our server without any problems.
c) Built-In application features: We found every generic solution already built-in in Ktor: Compression, Call-Logging while Debugging, HttpsRedirecting, SessionCookies, CORS, Metrics. (Metrics was pointed out to us by @Deactivated User).
d) Architecture: Due to its well structured architecture it is quite easy to extend Ktor with custom features. Its very rare to see in the “web”-domain projects that are well architectured. (e.g. without the need of reading the documentation it is perfectly clear how to respond with a redirect (call.responseRedirect(url)), repond with a Json call.respondeText(string, ContentType.Application.Json) or just get all headers (call.request.headers)).
e) No “magic”. I use Meteor in another project. Compared with that it is always clear or at least easy to find out with a debugger whats going on in the system.
f) Made by the folks at JetBrains. Not only does this mean that I can expect a very high amount of quality, but also while debugging things I often discover new ways of how to express things in kotlin. By reading the source code / architecture of Ktor you can understand how Kotlin is “meant to be”.

[samir]

Likes: Extremely easy to get started with, very well documented, features and the way they are added to the application
Dislikes: Routing. I am coming from a framework that uses type safe routing and coming to Ktor I felt really disappointed having to validate my parameters manually in routes and the location feature unfortunately doesn’t really do it either

[napperley]

Pros - Easy to use with Ktor not being opinionated and magical ✨. Good documentation 📖 with a very good search system 🔍. Modular system for adding features. DSLs for declaratively building routes/web UIs.

Cons - No documentation on developing a full stack web app using Ktor (for back-end), and a Kotlin UI library/toolkit/framework (for front-end which is NOT based on a JS UI framework; could be a Kotlin one based on WASM in the near future, which is an opportunity for collaboration between JB and the Kotlin community). Full stack web app example ( https://github.com/ktorio/ktor-samples/tree/master/mpp/fullstack-mpp ) is too basic (not realistic).

[Marc Knaup]

I love ktor because it's very simple to use and to extend, provides all the typical use-cases and features (including dead-simple WebSockets), covers both the server- and the client-side but most importantly blends perfectly with coroutines ❤️

[Vinicius Carvalho]

Do we have a release date already? Does it mean we will be able to get it from jcenter/central soon?

[orangy]

We don’t have a date yet, but it will be in central soon, yes.