Hi there people, I'm glad to be here. Few days ago I've started reading about Compose for Web, and to be honest I immediately got some ideas for my future projects where I can explore it furthermore! 🙂 Now I also have few questions. I want to create a project with Ktor as a back-end server and Compose Web for front-end. Now I'm having troubles setting up the basic project manually in Intelij IDEA. Can someone provide me some maybe useful resource where I can read more about it, or even explain it to me here. Is there any kind of template for creating that project which includes Ktor and Compose Web, like we have it on start.ktor.io (Even tho it would be even better to be able to generate that kind of project directly inside Intelij IDEA, and not externally like that) :D

Here's an example of ktor server and compose-web frontend that can be hosted both, standalone and embedded into ktor server https://github.com/mpetuska/kamp/tree/feature/compose/app

@Big Chungus Thanks for the repository. I've checked the code, and there are many things that I'm not familiar with. For example inside a gradle build file I'm not sure what all those blocks actually mean, if I were to create a blank template, I would have to add those things manually, even tho I don't know what each block means. That's the main problem for me atm. Is there are resource that can help me with that, or it's still early for well documented text?

Well it depends on what setup you're after. Can you list out some bullet points on what you're trying to achieve?

@Big Chungus Well I was planning to start with a simple project like, having a simple web page designed with Compose Web, and a backend server, where I would get the data and display it inside that page. So for example, reading the data from the server, and displaying it on the page. Ktor + Compose Web. :)

Do you want them both hosted together or would you like your frontend to be hosted standalone

Depends, what do I get with each approach? 🤔 Btw, thank you for answering all my questions 🙏

This decision is not language-specific, so google around and ping me back once you've made it. We can discuss gradle setup from there.

@Big Chungus I want them to be hosted together. :)

Allright, then you'll need your ktor server to also serve your compose app as static resources

I would also like to support Android as well

But for simplicity, let's assume you go with single module. In that case you want KMP setup to have js and jvm targets, which will give you three main sourceSets - commonMain, jsMain and jvmMain

Yep

Ok then go for three module approach - shared, server & client (just like in my example above)

Yeah, that seems cleaner

Here are key bits to note: • This obtains a reference to JS output from

client

module so that it could be embedded into

server

module output (fat-jar) • This creates a run task supporting KTOR's hot-reload for local development • This adds js bundle output file location is added to the classpath, so that they could be picked up from outside the jar when running in dev-mode (better hot-reload) • This is where JS output is actually embedded into the server fat-jar • And finally, here both possible places for JS static resources are registered as static resources that ktor will be serving • Oh and this configures the actual hot-reload

@Big Chungus Wow, thank you for the detailed answer, I'll be sure to bookmark all of this! Also I'm so excited to work on it! 🙌

Let me know how you get on eventually

If you hit any walls feel free to let us know, I've started to get the hang of this slightly strange setup as well

@martmists Yeah, but since it's new, I guess we can expect to see at least some more documentation about it in the future, and maybe even some improvements when it comes to project setup. 🙃

There's some (but not many)

Depending on how simple your server needs are, you may want to check out my project, Kobweb, which makes it a breeze to define server API routes.