Kotlinx itself doesn't have any utilities to send the result to the user's browser. It's just a regular Kotlin code which can create HTML string. You need a way to send it to the user. There are some.
The simplest one is plain old Java servlets. Anybody still using them?
@WebServlet(urlPatterns = arrayOf("/servlet"), loadOnStartup = 1)
class KotlinxHtmlServlet : HttpServlet() {
override fun doGet(request: HttpServletRequest?, response: HttpServletResponse?) {
response!!.setContentType("text/html")
response!!.writer.appendHTML(true).html {
head {
title = "Hello from kotlinx.html + Servlets"
}
body {
h1 { +"Kotlin is awesome" }
p {
+"Read more about "
a("http://kotlinlang.org") {
target = ATarget.blank
+"it"
}
}
}
}
}
}
Spring Boot is very popular today. However, this @Controller will work in vanilla Spring too:
@Controller
class KotlinxHtmlController {
@ResponseBody
@RequestMapping(path = arrayOf("controller"), method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.GET))
fun doGet(): String {
return createHTML(true).html {
head {
title = "Hello from kotlinx.html + Servlets"
}
body {
h1 { +"Kotlin is awesome" }
p {
+"Read more about "
a("http://kotlinlang.org") {
target = ATarget.blank
+"it"
}
}
}
}
}
}
SparkJava is one of the plenty of young Java micro-frameworks. Note, that in case of SparkJava you can just write routes inside your main:
fun main(args: Array<String>): Unit {
get("spark", { request: Request, response: Response ->
createHTML(true).html {
head {
title = "Hello from kotlinx.html + Servlets"
}
body {
h1 { +"Kotlin is awesome" }
p {
+"Read more about "
a("http://kotlinlang.org") {
target = ATarget.blank
+"it"
}
}
}
}
})
}
I'm leaving dependency management, running the app and guessing the correct URLs to access generated pages to you. All of the above examples will result in this HTML:
<html>
<head title="Hello from kotlinx.html + Servlets"></head>
<body>
<h1>Kotlin is awesome</h1>
<p>Read more about <a href="http://kotlinlang.org" target="_blank">it</a></p>
</body>
</html>
You can also try Dropwizard or Ninja frameworks.
Also, you can take a look at Kara – a web frameworks especially designed for Kotlin – but it is still in alpha stage.
