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Robert Jaros
Robert Jaros

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An introduction to KVision

KVision is an open source web framework created for Kotlin/JS. It allows developers to build modern web applications with the Kotlin language.

It's a relatively new project (first version was published a year ago), but it's probably the most comprehensive and full-featured Kotlin framework targeting the frontend.

Certainly many of you wonder why anyone would like to work with frontend in Kotlin, since there are so many great tools and frameworks for JavaScript or TypeScript. You can read:

article by Cássio Souza to find a lot of different reasons. I fully agree with them all.

Why did I create a new framework?

I missed times when the user interface was built from objects. Not from files, templates or sheets, but with a hierarchy of reusable and extendable components. We don't do this in web development since the first HTML page was created, even though the whole world outside is doing just that for ages. Turbo Vision, OWL, VCL, MFC, WinForms, QT, AWT, Swing, JavaFX or even the fresh born Flutter - these are just a few examples from the history of OOP UI development. KVision follows that path - it's an object-oriented framework created for the fully object-oriented programming language.

Noteworthy features

What KVision has to offer?

One language to rule them all

You write applications in KVision with the Kotlin language only. There is no need for CSS, HTML or JavaScript. This paradigm is gaining popularity. You can find similar efforts in the Scala, Dart or Go language communities. But in my opinion you will not find anything so developer friendly and consistent as KVision. And working with Kotlin is really fast, efficient and fun!

Hello World!

What would be the introduction without the "Hello World!" example. So here you have ;-)

div {
    +"Hello World!"
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Of course it's just a snippet. You will find more examples at the KVision GitHub page and in the kvision-examples repository. You can also look at the comprehensive KVision guide.

If you like the idea - just play with the code, fork the project, fill an issue or create a pull request. And I plan to write more articles about KVision for Dev.to anytime soon!

Top comments (2)

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floatoverflow profile image
FloatOverflow

Great framework - I'm using it from couple of months and it is great.

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alfredlotsu2 profile image
Alfred

My team and I love your work