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Comment by matrix | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a little off-topic, but can anyone share their experience with using Kotlin to build a non-trivial web app and what their stack was?

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I work at one of those big tech companies which has a huge number of services in its codebase in Java (you could properly guess the company). We use Kotlin daily for back-end services as a cleaner and more powerful Java, and we've migrated most of our original Java spring/rest projects to be in Kotlin. If you're familiar with Java-based stacks, I think it's fairly trivial to migrate to Kotlin first as a Java substitute before taking advantage of everything Kotlin has to offer, then slowly adopting Kotlin principles.

I am really interested in what company this is. I love kotlin and wish I could switch all of our new java services to kotlin going forward

That's very encouraging to hear. Is your team still using it with Spring (Spring Boot?) or something along those lines? If you were starting a new Kotlin REST server app today, do you think your team would still use that?

I use Kotlin for services I write. My previous stack was Kotlin + Vert.x but I've ditched Vert.x for Sparkjava more recently... not a fan of the async model.

Async is fine but Vert.x's version of it is kind of retarded. Callback hell. Might be better with 3.4 now that it supports Scala and Futures.

Yes, I think you're right. The Vert.x model is "weird" to put it politely. Too many callbacks, but also I felt like much of my domain and business code was being "infected" by Vert.x machinery as I tried to make my code async friendly.

It makes a lot of big promises, delivers on many of them early on but as your services grow things... get messier.

Happy enough with Sparkjava right now. I think ultimately though I'm on a slow journey back to just using Dropwizard which still hits the sweet spot for me.

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