I have been trying out htmx with Kotlin and http4k. To use htmx, you need some way of generating HTML on the server. In Kotlin, you have plenty of options, both Kotlin specific ones and everything from the broader Java/JVM ecosystem. There are two main categories here, template languages and internal DSLs. Given Kotlin’s good support for internal DSLs, I decided to explore that route, and try kotlinx.html and HtmlFlow. They both make great promises of encoding the entire HTML standard and enforce valid HTML at compile time.

I am using PostgreSQL from a Kotlin (JVM) application with the pgJDBC driver. According to the documentation, you can get results from a query based on a cursor to avoid loading the whole result set into the application’s memory at once by calling the setFetchSize() method with a positive value on the Statement before issuing the query. I had a non-trivial query which generated a lot of rows (several thousands), and I only needed the first hundred or so.

You can do quite a lot with Docker, but sometimes you want greater capabilities or increased security, then a proper virtual machine with KVM is a good alternative. An example is when you want to run Docker containers in the VM, it’s not easy to nest Docker without forgoing all security. Just like Alpine Linux is suitable as a base for Docker images, it is also a good option as a guest in a virtual machine.