Re:Why Kotlin is my next programming language (2015)
by rattray on Saturday June 18, 2016 @08:54PM
(#11931355)
> your unfamiliarity with the JVM
Correct!
> a problem with multi-language, multi-compiler projects that none of the major build systems on the JVM really handle admirably
A bummer to hear – though I'm glad it's not just me. I tried using Kotlin with the Play Framework and did not have a great time. The hot-reloading features of Play didn't work with Kotlin at all, even with my attempts to `touch` a Java file whenever my Kotlin file changed (presumably they're recompiling more intelligently than I was).
Perhaps having SomeController.java and SomeController.kt in parallel, where the former imports the latter, and receives a `touch` or similar whenever the Kotlin file changes, might work? Or would you recon such a project to be a fool's errand?
Re:Why Kotlin is my next programming language (2015)
by eropple on Saturday June 18, 2016 @10:00PM
(#11931521)
Play isn't built for Kotlin and SBT is kind of a tire fire in general. I would suggest something more like Dropwizard for use with non-Scala JVM languages.
Re:Why Kotlin is my next programming language (2015)
by EtienneK on Sunday June 19, 2016 @02:07AM
(#11931982)
Or Spring Boot, which is fantastic.
Re:Why Kotlin is my next programming language (2015)
by eropple on Monday June 20, 2016 @01:16PM
(#11939436)
I've never used Spring Boot - feel like plugging it a little? Dropwizard is the de facto in my neck of the woods, but I'm always looking for an improvement.
Re:Why Kotlin is my next programming language (2015)
by rattray on Sunday June 19, 2016 @01:10PM
(#11933682)
Thanks for the tip! Looks like there's even a starter example: https://github.com/doomspork/kotlin-dropwizard/
I would suggest (and I'm not trying to bag on you with this) that this concern is more your unfamiliarity with the JVM than a failure of Kotlin, which is generally targeting Java and Scala developers. Kotlin operates pretty idiomatically in the Java universe and, as an experienced JVM developer who's comfortable with all of Maven, Gradle, and SBT, I dropped Kotlin into a Maven project, side-by-side with Java, with a cursory glance at the documentation--"oh, it's another pre-compile-step thing". (Which I then consume via IntelliJ, because IntelliJ imports Maven projects nicely, but Maven allows others to use their IDE of choice.)
The pre-compile-step thing sucks, I'll be the first to say that, and it's a problem with multi-language, multi-compiler projects that none of the major build systems on the JVM really handle admirably. I prefer to use multi-module Maven projects and separate out Java and Kotlin--or Scala, for that matter--code into separate ones. But that's a different beast entirely from the initial bootstrap when learning.