Creating a Web Application with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose
Chiara 
Google Cloud Platform offers a series of tutorials for deploying Kotlin applications to GCP, both for Ktor and App Engine and Spring and App engine. In addition, there is an interactive code lab for deploying a Kotlin Spring application. Ktor supports this approach by integrating with several server-page technologies. When Kweb receives an HTTP request it responds with a small HTML file including optimized instructions for building the page, and a client that connects back to the web server via a WebSocket. A community curated list of Kotlin related resources, frameworks, libraries, and tools. This full-stack framework with a wide range of add-ons is a great fit for business application development with Kotlin.
Web Development with Kotlin: An Introduction to the Kotlin Language
All these frameworks have either code samples in Java and Kotlin side by side or have dedicated tutorials on how to use the framework with Kotlin. The start.spring.io project generator also supports Kotlin Web development along with Java and Groovy. With Kinsta’s Application Hosting, you can deploy your Java and Kotlin projects in minutes. Benefit from a fast and secure infrastructure, deploying your projects on infrastructure built on Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network and C2 machines.
Promoting our Wasm target and Compose Multiplatform for web to Beta
Many startups and Fortune 500 companies have already developed Android applications using Kotlin, see the list on the Google website for Android developers. While you could manually add these plugins to your existing project, it’s easier to generate a new project and gradually incorporate code from the previous tutorial. We’ll provide all the necessary code along the way, so you don’t need to have the previous projects to hand. Each IDEA release introduces new features and upgrades that improve the experience for Kotlin developers in the IDE.
Code Organization Tips
- In the sections that follow, we’ll walk you through the most important updates and initiatives, from IDE tooling and interoperability improvements to the evolution of Compose Multiplatform for web.
- Kotlin-Web is a popular framework for building web applications in Kotlin, providing a robust set of tools and libraries for building web applications.
- We can use Kotlin Exposed to define database schemas, query data, and perform CRUD operations.
- We recommend that you start with the Building web applications with Spring Boot and Kotlin tutorial.
- By following this tutorial, you will be able to create a web application using Kotlin and Spring Boot, and you will learn how to optimize performance, secure the application, and debug issues.
Also, while Java has primitive types, which you must explicitly define for variables and methods, Kotlin treats them as objects and can infer data types. Kotlin also provides different syntactic sugar, such as data classes, extension functions, smart casts, and operator overloading, making code expressive and maintainable. More developers and organizations are embracing Kotlin with Ktor and Kotlin/JS for web development. Nonetheless, Java still has the upper hand in this area thanks to its extensive, stable, and mature ecosystem of libraries and frameworks tailored for web development.
Yes, Kotlin can be used to build single-page applications (SPAs) by leveraging Kotlin/JS, React, or other frontend frameworks. You can create the frontend logic using Kotlin and interact with backend APIs. If you’re interested in learning more about Kotlin web development, there are a number of resources available. JetBrains, the creator of Kotlin, has an active community of developers who are constantly sharing tips and tools. There are also a number of online tutorials and courses available to help you get started.
Step 2: Creating a Simple Web Application
- The talk showcases what Kobweb can do, introduces Compose HTML (which it buildson top of), and covers a wide range of frontend and backend functionality.
- Ktor is a lightweight web framework for Kotlin that provides an expressive DSL for building web applications.
- Kotlin compiles to JVM bytecode, which can be executed by any JVM-based application.
- Of course, Spring and Ktor are not the only frameworks in the JVM ecosystem and there are plenty of other frameworks that you can use with Kotlin.
- With Compose Multiplatform, the frameworkowns its own rendering pipeline, drawing to a buffer.
- The problem that many Java developers are familiar with is NullPointerException that happens when accessing null reference from code and causes runtime errors and crashes.
One of the key features of Kotlin that makes it a great fit for server-side web apps is its support for null safety and extension functions. This reduces the likelihood of null pointer exceptions, a common issue in Java applications, thus enhancing the robustness of your applications. Kotlin frameworks also leverage Kotlin’s ability to produce concise and expressive code, making your projects not only easier to maintain but also quicker to develop. Another lightweight toolkit in our list is Http4k which allows developers to build cloud-native applications using Kotlin.
Familiarize yourself with Kotlin syntax by solving short programming challenges. Learn everything about classes, collections, properties, builders, and generic functions. Generating API documentation from source code is also an important part Senior iOS developer job of software project development. Just like Kotlin itself, Dokka fully supports mixed-language Java/Kotlin projects. It understands standard Javadoc comments in Java files and KDoc comments in Kotlin files, and can generate documentation in multiple formats including standard Javadoc, HTML, and Markdown. Thanks to the type system, especially null-safety, Kotlin is quite a safe programming language.