4 ms·

I've been very happy writing Kotlin backend code for the last fourteen months or so. Definitely excited. It's an awesome JVM language.

agumonkey 10y ago
I'm investigating Kotlin. Do you have references, blogs etc to suggest ?
- Larrikin 10y ago
  Through this blog https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/ https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/ And his book I was able to become fairly productive in the language in only a few weeks. I was familiar with Scala however. The automatic conversion of java to Kotlin in Intelli J's IDEs also helped immensely.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  For the most part I found the official Kotlin reference documentation to be excellent and more than enough to move from a strong Java and Groovy background. I follow /r/kotlin as well. Advanced idioms and stuff I've just picked up looking through GitHub repositories. What I really like about Kotlin is just about everything "works" as it should or you can usually write a Google search that will reference Stack Overflow. I don't have to dig much to find answers and in the absolute worst case I can just drop back to Java and do it the classic way.
sandGorgon 10y ago
what backend framework are you using ? i have been pretty interested in trying out spring boot 5 or vertx
- meddlepal 10y ago
  Vert.x though recently I switched back to Dropwizard for a prototype... it works mostly fine, but I think I've kinda fallen in love with Vert.x I think the only thing I find really annoying about Vert.x is the lack of built-in JSON -> object binding. I've written some cheap glue code to fix that though.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    are you using Jackson or gson to do this ? I have heard lots of conflicting advice on this... so am curious on what you are doing
    - meddlepal 10y ago
      I use Jackson. I am much more familiar with it and the Jackson Kotlin module works nicely out of the box (https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-module-kotlin https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-module-kotlin). Also Vert.x is using Jackson under the hood so one less critical dependency to think about. I think Gson is more common on the Android side of things where Kotlin has (I believe) a lot more popularity than on the backend.

agumonkey 10y ago

I'm investigating Kotlin. Do you have references, blogs etc to suggest ?

Larrikin 10y ago
Through this blog https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/ https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/ And his book I was able to become fairly productive in the language in only a few weeks. I was familiar with Scala however. The automatic conversion of java to Kotlin in Intelli J's IDEs also helped immensely.
meddlepal 10y ago
For the most part I found the official Kotlin reference documentation to be excellent and more than enough to move from a strong Java and Groovy background. I follow /r/kotlin as well. Advanced idioms and stuff I've just picked up looking through GitHub repositories. What I really like about Kotlin is just about everything "works" as it should or you can usually write a Google search that will reference Stack Overflow. I don't have to dig much to find answers and in the absolute worst case I can just drop back to Java and do it the classic way.

sandGorgon 10y ago

what backend framework are you using ? i have been pretty interested in trying out spring boot 5 or vertx

meddlepal 10y ago
Vert.x though recently I switched back to Dropwizard for a prototype... it works mostly fine, but I think I've kinda fallen in love with Vert.x I think the only thing I find really annoying about Vert.x is the lack of built-in JSON -> object binding. I've written some cheap glue code to fix that though.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  are you using Jackson or gson to do this ? I have heard lots of conflicting advice on this... so am curious on what you are doing
  - meddlepal 10y ago
    I use Jackson. I am much more familiar with it and the Jackson Kotlin module works nicely out of the box (https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-module-kotlin https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-module-kotlin). Also Vert.x is using Jackson under the hood so one less critical dependency to think about. I think Gson is more common on the Android side of things where Kotlin has (I believe) a lot more popularity than on the backend.