Hey guys, I have been an android developer for the past 3 years. I recently saw a post where Kotlin ...

# server

[Arun Sudharsan]

Hey guys, I have been an android developer for the past 3 years. I recently saw a post where Kotlin became one of the official languages for backend development in big tech companies. I always wanted to try out backend dev. I think now would be the right time.. can anyone guide me with the right path? TIA!

[Ron S]

Hey! Kotlin is on the rise!
I think it's a good choice for backend development.

So, there are some established frameworks on the market like Spring that offer official support for Kotlin now - and that is great. But if you want to bring Kotlin to its full potential Ktor (which is written purely in Kotlin) is the way to go. Despite still being a smaller framework, it is backed by JetBrains and actively under development.

When it comes to choosing a framework... I find that very difficult. There are plenty of resources for Spring as it has been around for two decades and it's hard to kick off the throne. But I personally like to go with a more modern, lightweight framework than Spring. Micronaut and Quarkus are two examples I came across. But there is still little documentation.

JetBrains appears to be investing in the Kotlin backend ecosystem and I expect it to grow in the future.

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/server-overview.html

[Arun Sudharsan]

thank you Ron

[nickyhannaway]

@dmcg Duncan McGregor's YouTube channel is a good place to start, an excellent ground up journey can be had going through his videos.

[Alan B]

Others may suggest jumping into a framework. You don’t need to. Start out by using some common APIs that make life easier as someone mentioned Ktor, or perhaps Http4k. You don’t need DI and all that annotation cruft to build things. You will spend more time focusing on that silly framework and figuring out why things are not working, rather than understanding system’s design.

[antonarhipov]

@Arun Sudharsan we have a pretty simple tutorial with Spring for those who want to get started with Kotlin for backend development:
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/jvm-spring-boot-restful.html#frameworks-for-server-side-development-with-kotlin

However, as others said, Ktor and http4k might be equally good for you. There’s a pretty good list of sample apps at Ktor website and it’s very simple toolkit for building server apps: https://ktor.io/learn/

[Ros]

I started using kotlin with Spring I think 3 years ago by now, I love it!
Start installing intellij and the plugin

[Ros]

then I think we can guide you

[Matteo Mirk]

Frag Spring, you don’t need that bloatware!

[Ron S]

@Matteo Mirk Right on! Dirty Spring with proxies and reflections.

[Edward Sentongo]

Get any Springboot application, include gradle kotlin dependencies, start transforming one class and gradually move on.

If you’re using IntelliJ, it will automatically convert your Java code to Kotlin as you paste it in the IDE