Setting Up

KVision supports six server-side frameworks - Ktor, Jooby, Spring Boot, Javalin, Vert.x and Micronaut - so you have to choose one of them for your needs. It's worth to mention, that common and js targets of your application are exactly the same for all three servers, as well as the greater part of the actual service implementation in the jvm target. The differences are tied to initialization code and additional server side functionalities (e.g. authentication).

KVision fullstack applications utilize Kotlin multiplatform architecture. To start, it's best to just clone one of the template-fullstack projects from kvision-examples GitHub repository or use KVision Project Wizard.

The application sources are split into three source sets - common, js and jvm, located in three directories: src/commonMain src/jsMain and src/jvmMain. The requirements and dependencies for the build process are the same as mentioned in Part 1 of this guide.

Since version 2.0 you can use KVision compiler plugin to generate code in the common and js modules. You can still create this code by hand, but it's definitely easier to use the plugin.

Development

During the development phase you compile and run js and jvm targets separately.

Frontend

To run the frontend application with Gradle continuous build enter:

./gradlew -t jsRun                                (on Linux)
gradlew.bat -t jsRun                              (on Windows)

Backend

To run the backend application enter:

./gradlew jvmRun                                    (on Linux)
gradlew.bat jvmRun                                  (on Windows)

There are different levels of support when it comes to auto-reload. Javalin doesn't support auto-reload at all. Jooby and Vert.x have built-in auto-reload based on sources monitoring, so it works out of the box. In case of Ktor and Spring Boot auto-reload is based on the classpath monitoring, so you have to run another Gradle process for continuous build:

### Ktor or Spring Boot
./gradlew -t compileKotlinJvm                       (on Linux)
gradlew.bat -t compileKotlinJvm                     (on Windows)

After both parts of your application are running, you can open http://localhost:3000/ in your favourite browser. Changes made to your sources (in any source set) should be automatically applied to your running application.

Production

To build complete application optimized for production run:

./gradlew clean jar                   (on Linux)
gradlew.bat clean jar                 (on Windows)

The application jar will be saved in build/libs directory (projectname-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar). You can run your application with thejava -jar command.

java -jar build/libs/projectname-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar