Hello everyone, Hexagon 1.0 got released!!! It is...

# server

[jaguililla]

Hello everyone, Hexagon 1.0 got released!!!

It is a toolkit for developing web services in Kotlin heavily inspired in Javalin and Spark.

I would like to gather feedback from the community, so if you could take a look at it, share your thoughts, spread the word among other Kotlin developers and/or give it a star 😉 It would be much appreciated 🙂

https://hexagonkt.com
https://github.com/hexagonkt

[Ben]

What advantage does Hexagon provide over Javalin, Spark, Ktor, etc?

[jaguililla]

I wanted to make it very easy to use and provide features Spark/Javalin lack, like configuration management. But to be honest, there are others that are missing (like Web Sockets).

[jtravis]

Doesn’t Spring (Boot) fit the bill as well?

[dave]

@jaguililla many congrats on v1 - personally I think it's great to have a wide variety of ideas and approaches in this space- that's how everything gets better- so well done! 🙃

The comparison matrix is a little wrong in the http4k case, would you want a PR to the docs to fix, or just let you know on slack?

[jaguililla]

Sorry about that, you can tell me what's wrong or make a PR yourself... whatever suits you the most 🙂 and thanks for the kind words 🙂

[jaguililla]

@jtravis You are right, Spring Boot does the job (though I would prefer Vert.x) My intention is not to compete with other FWs, there are plenty of good ones there (HTTP4K, Ktor, Javalin...), I developed Hexagon for myself because back at the time there were not a lot of options. And now I just want to get feedback to learn about the experience and keep improving 🙂

[dave]

No problem - to even have the matrix is possibly an ongoing workload for yourself as things evolve, but if you're going to keep it, then:

HTTP Engines - support for SunHttp as a dev server (no dependencies), plus Ktor CIO and AWS Lambda as a backend
Annotated Routes - not sure what these are - could you elaborate?
Non blocking I/O - this is current WIP (although admittedly not imminent)
API Documentation - now supports (the relevant majority of) OpenApi3 (it may be worth generally switching Swagger for OpenApi in the description as Swagger is kind of dead)
Configuration - there is a typesafe configuration module which supports 12factor/properties/files

[jaguililla]

Annotated Routes would be routes like @GET("/path")

[dave]

aha - ok - then the grid is right - http4k doesn't do annotations.

[jaguililla]

Now that you detail the changes... I would prefer that you make the PR, would you mind? just to not skip anything... maybe I delete it in the future (I cannot scan the other tools periodically 😞 )

[dave]

np. can you point me at the location in github?

[jaguililla]

Or just leave the links without the features