Anyone want to share their opinion on using someth...

# server

[John Hageman]

Anyone want to share their opinion on using something like kotlinx.html for server side rendering vs a traditional templating engine like FreeMarker or Pebble? Just looking for advice or feedback on current best practices, if there are any.

[david-wg2]

what are you making?

[spand]

Its nice to have kotlin in the template instead of a gimped programming language. On the other hand the compilation speed versus other template types isnt great

[spand]

Would choose kotlinx.html again

[John Hageman]

At the moment I'm just toying around. I'm coming from a python/flask background, so I'm used to Jinja templates but playing with kotlinx.html has been enjoyable. Before I started actually using it just wanted to make sure I wasn't committing a big no no. 😂

[John Hageman]

I doubt template compilation speed will ever be a factor for my projects but will make sure to benchmark it a bit to see if it makes a huge difference. Thanks for the feedback!

[david-wg2]

if what you're making anything interactive you should really look into javascript solutions (like vue.js), it will make everything a lot more manageable in the long run

[addamsson]

ever since I started using kotlinx.html every templating language seems anemic

[addamsson]

the promise of templating languages like thymeleaf is that the designer can fiddle around with it

[addamsson]

but in practice this almost never happens so it is infinitely better imho to use a proper programming language for templating

[Jeff Gulbronson]

I’ve tried to get our frontend devs to write our email templates in kotlin, but it seems compilation speed is a big slowdown. Anyone reached a similar conclusion?

[krotki]

everything in kotlinx.html is a function, so you can test it 🙂

[napperley]

It is significantly easier to do loose coupling with DSLs (it is a series of function calls), and is very tooling friendly (no extra tools/plugins required).

[spand]

@Jeff Gulbronson Yes it can be really slow. I am not going to trade our sass for a kotlin dsl for this reason.

[Bernhard]

main benefit is that XSS is impossible if used normally

[Bernhard]

because you have type safe builders compared to strings