Geospatial Messenger – Spring Boot

Writing code in Kotlin is fun, thanks to its concise nature that allows writing applications with shorter, efficient, and expressive code. One of the biggest selling points of Kotlin is its excellent interoperability with Java which means it is designed to play well with the Java ecosystem; the frameworks and libraries. 

Things get really interesting and fun when Kotlin is used together with Spring Boot, which is one of the most widely used web frameworks for quickly bootstrapping and developing web applications in Java language. Spring Boot promotes convention over configuration and thus focuses on eliminating the specification of obvious choices, making the codebase expressive and concise. As we know, Kotlin's constructs also focus on expressiveness and conciseness. Hence development with Spring Boot benefits greatly from the use of Kotlin.

It is no surprise then that with the release of Spring Boot Framework 5.0, the Spring team announced full support for Kotlin. Not only that, Kotlin specific features were also added. It is a huge step towards combining these two technologies in a simple and powerful way to quickly build web applications with a concise code base.

Through this chapter, you'll learn how to build a geospatial messenger application in Kotlin with Spring Boot technology. The best way to get the benefit of this chapter is to practice it as you go through the chapter so that you have the application running on your machine by the end.

In this chapter, we will learn:

• Spring Boot
• To build a Geospatial Messenger application with the Spring Boot Framework and Kotlin; with the database as Postgres