Recap: Server-Side Web Pages With Kotlin
In the first article, server-side web pages with Kotlin part 1, a brief history of web development was outlined: namely, the four main stages being static HTML page delivery; server-side programmatic creation of web pages; HTML templating engines, again server-side; and finally, client-side programmatic creation of web pages. While contemporary web development is mostly focused on the last of the four stages (i.e., creating web pages on the client side), there still exist good cases for rendering web pages on the server side of the web application; furthermore, new technologies like kotlinx.html – a library by the authors of Kotlin for generating HTML code via a domain-specific language (DSL) – provide additional options for server-side web development. To give an example, the following two approaches produce the same homepage for the Spring Boot-powered website of a hypothetical bookstore:
Templating Engine (Thymeleaf)
The basic workflow for rendering a webpage with a template engine like Thymeleaf is to create an HTML template page in the resources/templates folder of the project, in this case home.html: