Is the Kara project (Kotlin-based web framework) dead?

I can't help but notice that the last commit to the Github repo was 5 months ago :-/

I’m evaluating web platforms for a new project, I would love to use Kotlin and Kara looks very interesting, but the lack of recent commits makes me very nervous.

2 Likes

This fork is being actively developed and used inside JetBrains. We haven't decided whether we are going to release it a separate product and/or contribute the changes to the original Kara, but anyway, the development goes on and the results look very nice to me.

1 Like

Also take a note of Hadi Hariri's Wasabi

1 Like

Thanks Andrey, I'll check out both of those projects.

It's strange, Wasabi has no documentation that I can see on how to actually start a Wasabi project (eg. no maven dependency), and Kara seems to be avoiding any dependency management systems also.  It's a shame because it's bound to hurt adoption (typically I won't use a library that isn't available as a Maven dependency).

Wasabi otherwise looks quite close to what I need, since the app I’m building is likely to use a rich javascript framework and therefore only really needs to serve up a few static pages and then respond to JSON API calls.

Hi Ian

I am going to be adding support for Maven to Wasabi. Unfortunately just haven’t had time yet but will do. Obviously more than happy to also accept pull requests if you’re up to it :slight_smile:

I’ve mostly been focusing to make sure I get the API right or as close to what I think would be versatile enough.

Thanks for the reply Hadi, that's great to hear.

I would love to help you with this but unfortunately I’m already overcommitted with my own various open source projects :-(  I think it should be quite straightfowrard though, just rework the directory structure and replace the libs/ directory with dependencies.  In fact, I suspect it might make your own development efforts easier.

Thanks again,

Ian.

Is there Gradle support already? Whilst the Maven Central repository is brilliant I have given up on Maven as a build system. (Just like Google for Android :-)

No, and I'm more inclined to Gradle having played with it a little...   

Gradle is fine, the important thing is that it is made available via a public Maven repository.  I assume Gradle can do that?

Yep. Gradle "adds" to Maven. It still uses Maven Repository (or any other one for that matter).   

That's great!

It is not my intent to place time pressure on you, but I’m hoping to start architecting my new project in the next few days, and I’d love to base it on Wasabi.  Do you think you’re likely to complete the Gradle integration in that timeframe?

Ian.

Hadi, a question about Wasabi (is there another way to contact you?  I don't see a mailing list or email address on the Wasabi site...?)

Does Wasabi handle deserialization of JSON code sent via POST and PUT HTTP requests?  This is quite a common use-case with JSON-based APIs in my experience.

Gradle support should be coming this week.

I've created a group. Let's move this thread there:

wasabifx@googlegroups.com

Thanks.   

Original creator of Kara here. It's not dead, I've just been a little busy lately. I'm coming back to put some more work into it.

Not sure what changes the Jetbrains guys have made on their internal fork, but I’d be interested in merging it back so we can join efforts.

Regarging dependency management, we use Ivy internally for Kara. Haven’t quire figured out how to expose that to the app level yet. I’d like to have a Kotlin DSL to Ivy, ideally.

Feel free to let me know if you have nay questions.

1 Like

It would be great to have it on Maven central. Both the original and the fork aren’t on there unfortunately. :disappointed:

We don’t publish Kara to Maven Central because we don’t have anyone who could take responsibility for other aspects of maintaining the project which would be necessary to make it usable outside of JetBrains: writing documentation, managing releases and publishing release notes, supporting users, ensuring backwards compatibility and so on.

If the main point for you is to have a maven dependency for this project, you could use https://jitpack.io/ for that. It allows you to use any Github release (or commit) as a version. You can plug any GitHub repository url in the search box at the top to get suggested options.

4 Likes