Using Ktor 3.0 with All the Shiny Things • Garth Gilmour • GOTO 2024

Ktor 3.0 emphasizes a “no magic” philosophy - all features must be explicitly enabled through plugins, avoiding convention over configuration

Testing is a core strength with built-in support for route testing, mock engines, and IDE integration that can auto-generate tests for routes

Full multiplatform support allows compiling Ktor applications to JVM, Native (iOS, Android) and WebAssembly targets

Dependency injection is supported through integration with libraries like Koin, with ability to scope components to requests and support multiple containers

Built-in support for popular protocols and patterns:

• GraphQL with schema generation
• WebSockets with JSON serialization
• OpenTelemetry integration for observability
• Request retry functionality with backoff policies

Kotlin Notebook integration enables rapid prototyping and experimentation with Ktor without setting up full projects

Native compilation support produces fast-starting executables without requiring a JVM

Strong plugin ecosystem with a registry for community-contributed plugins that can achieve official status

Focused on being minimal, flexible and fast while maintaining explicit control rather than magic conventions

Roadmap includes gRPC support, vendor-agnostic DI containers, and replacing bespoke networking with KotlinX I/O library