Frequently Asked Questions

Won't Kweb be slow relative to client-side web frameworks?

No, Kweb's immediate events allows you to avoid any server communication delay by responding immediately to DOM-modifying events.

Kweb is designed to be efficient by default, minimizing both browser and server CPU/memory.

If you encounter a situation in which Kweb is slow please submit a bug.

What's the difference between Kweb and Vaadin?

Of all web frameworks we're aware of, Vaadin is the closest in design and philosophy to Kweb, but there are also important differences:

  • Kweb is far more lightweight than Vaadin. At the time of writing, kweb-core is about 4,351 lines of code, while vaadin/framework is currently 502,398 lines of code, almost a 100:1 ratio!
  • Vaadin doesn't have any equivalent feature to Kweb's immediate events, which has led to frequent complaints of sluggishness from Vaadin users because a server round-trip is required to update the DOM.
  • Vaadin brought a more desktop-style of user interface to the web browser, but since then we've realized that users generally prefer their websites to look like websites.
  • This is why Kweb's philosophy is to be a thin interface between server logic and the user's browser, leveraging existing tools from the JavaScript ecosystem.
  • Kweb was built natively for Kotlin, and takes advantage of all of its language features like coroutines and the flexible DSL-like syntax. Because of this Kweb code can be a lot more concise, without sacrificing readability.
  • In Vaadin's favor, it has been a commercial product since 2006, it is extremely mature and has a vast developer ecosystem, while Kweb is still relatively new.

Is there a larger working example?

Yes, freenet.org is running on Kweb, which is in-turn running on Google Cloud Platform with FireStore as a database.

You can see a number of other example Kweb projects here: kwebio/kweb-demos

How do I enable HTTPS?

Very easily, please see this example. You can also rely on a load-balancer to translate between HTTPS and HTTP so that this is handled external to Kweb.

Note: It is highly recommended that you use HTTPS as plain HTTP is vulnerable to session hijacking, and Kweb does not yet (Jan 2023) implement mitigation measures against this. This is a common shortcoming for may web frameworks.

Can I embed Kweb within an Android app?

Yes! Please see kweb-demos/tree/master/android for an example.

I want to deploy a Kweb Application behind a load balancer, what do i need to consider?

Please make sure to enable session affinity so that repeated requests from the same client end up at the same kweb instance. Kweb does not share its internal state between multiple instances, so it is important to make sure that each request from a single user ends up at always the same instance.

If the load balancer uses e.g. round robin strategy for load balancing, repeated requests end up at different backend instances and kweb may not function propery.

Example how to setup HAProxy can be found here.

What about templates?

Kweb replaces templates with something better - a typesafe HTML DSL embedded within a powerful programming language.

If you like you could separate out the code that interfaces directly to the DOM - this would be architecturally closer to a template-based approach, but we view it as a feature that this paradigm isn't forced on the programmer.

Why risk my project on a framework I just heard of?

Picking a framework is stressful. Pick the wrong one and perhaps the company behind it goes out of business, meaning your entire app is now built on something obsolete. We've been there.

Kweb's development is driven by a community of volunteers. We welcome contributions from anyone, but Kweb doesn't depend on any sponsoring company.

Because of the powerful abstractions it's built on, Kweb also has the advantage of simplicity (<5k loc). This makes it easier for people to contribute, and less code means fewer bugs.

How is "Kweb" pronounced?

One syllable, like qu from quick - qu-web.

Can Kweb be embedded in an existing Ktor app?

Yes! Please see this example.

How do I add a favicon?

The easiest way is using the FaviconPlugin:

val faviconPlugin = FaviconPlugin {
    respondBytes(getFaviconAsBytes(), ContentType.Image.Any)
}
Kweb(port = 16097, plugins = listOf(faviconPlugin)) {
    doc.body {
        // ...
    }
}

If you don't provide a FaviconPlugin of some kind and KwebConfiguration.handleFavicon is true, Kweb will automatically use FaviconPlugin.notFound(), which will return a 404 response for any favicon requests.

If you need to handle favicon requests yourself, you can set KwebConfiguration.handleFavicon to false.

How do I enable auto-reloading?

See Ktor's auto-reloading documentation.

I have a question not answered here

Feel free to ask us a question on Github Issues, but please search first to see whether it has already been answered. For a more realtime experience you can also chat with us on Matrix.