Many teams use Kotlin and Ktor solely to create and consume RESTful HTTP services. They build modestly sized microservices and clients that perform a limited set of tasks well. These are completely valid use cases, but only scratch the surface of what is possible with Ktor in the latest release.

Ktor boasts an elegant and powerful testing library with built-in mocking. You can integrate with Koin for DI, GraphQL for querying and OpenTelemetry for observability. Using Kotlin Native and Gradle you can build native images and bundle them in Docker containers. Last but not least you have fine grained control over every aspect of the framework, and can easily extend it by creating your own plugins. These can optionally be published to a new public registry. To then be reviewed, reused, and refined by the community.

This talk will provide a whistle-stop tour of all the above. We will take a simple case study and incrementally layer on the shiny features. We will also discuss the ‘under the hood’ improvements in V3 - such as performance gains resulting from the migration to kotlinx-io. By the end you will have a comprehensive understanding of the intermediate and advanced functionality which Ktor can provide.