Hey how is the adoption of Kotlin for serverside g...

# server

[Jonathan Chen]

Hey how is the adoption of Kotlin for serverside going? I’m looking to get back into the Java world and am deciding if its worth it for me to invest time into Kotlin as well.

[napperley]

The general advise from many Kotliners would be to try out Kotlin in a new server-side project, and choose a web library/framework that provides official Kotlin support (Ktor, Spring Boot, HTTP4K, Vert.x etc).

[napperley]

This presentation shows some companies that are using Kotlin for server-side development:

https://youtu.be/x-fhypIRip4?t=265▾

[napperley]

Orange (the mobile telco) is one of the major users of Kotlin on the server-side. NetFlix is another major user (probably the biggest user unless Google or Pivotal have overtaken them). There is no shortage of major companies using Kotlin for server-side development (plenty of use cases to choose from).

[katsharp]

it's quite mature with a decent number of companies, including my workplace, using it

[tddmonkey]

Our company adopted Kotlin as an option some time last year - half our backend teams have moved completely - none of us are going back to Java 😄

[addamsson]

I can only talk about my experience: I've been using Kotlin on the server side for almost 4 years now. The most well-known web frameworks / libraries support Kotlin out of the box (including Spring) so it is a breeze to use them

[addamsson]

so I'd suggest trying it out with Spring Boot / Ktor or something (maybe Hexagon) and see for yourself

[sonofblip]

I work at target and we use kotlin for most new server-side development, in case you were looking for an example of a larger company.

[Jonathan Chen]

Thanks for the input. Its just one of those things where you want to learn something new for new opportunities, but don’t want to get caught off guard.

I’m planning on relearning Java and learn Spring Boot. I’ll add some time in there to work on a side project/idea that I have that would be a good learning experience for it.

[Jonathan Chen]

I have a lot of Python experience currently, and I want to branch out.

[napperley]

With your Python experience you might want to look at this migration guide: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/kotlin-for-py/introduction.html

[Jonathan Chen]

Yeah, I took a look at that. TBH, I feel a lot more comfortable in Kotlin than I do in Java. The only thing I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is gradle.

[napperley]

Gradle isn't the easiest build system to understand with its moderate learning curve. One of the big issues with Gradle is the documentation which has huge gaps, and there aren't good tutorials available which are comprehensive and up to date (especially videos).

[Jonathan Chen]

Yes you hit right on point. There are times I’m wondering. What’s the point of some of these things? Why are some people do things and others doing this way? its very weird… I’m just doing what “most” people are doing and hoping for the best.

[coder82]

I've been building bare bone Kotlin servers from scratch and using KTOR swagger codegen to build API, it's quite mature, I get to results much faster.