Moving to Ktor

In Yet Another Blog Implementation, I wrote about how I was using a custom Spring application with Thymeleaf for this site. I've pivoted again, using a combination of Ktor and Thymeleaf instead. The posts are still written in Markdown within the same repository.

The motivation was mostly just to keep everything I write consistent. I have a few other services in my monorepo that run on Ktor, and this site is simple enough that moving it over just made sense. Now that it's done, dependencies will be more limited and easier to manage.

But why move to Ktor for anything? I like the relative simplicity of it. Spring can do everything that Ktor can do, but it's verbose and feels heavy to work with after a while. Compared to Spring's very opinionated setup, Ktor starts in a bare-bones state, and you make your own decisions about what technologies you want to use. Sometimes these deliberate decisions feel like a waste of time, but the projects I work on are varied enough that having control over the entire stack is worth it.

I'm also playing around with Next.js for some things, but I'm not sure that I'd choose to use TypeScript for the entire stack. I see it as an enabler for SSR on sites where Thymeleaf isn't going to cut it. But who knows? 🤷

The long-term ambition is to make this software a blogging platform that supports the niches that I wrote about in the original post. There are microblogging solutions out there that work really well, but they're not solving a few problems that I think a new platform could draw a decent audience if it were to solve them.