kotlin-rpc

Work in progress!

It's a Kotlin-centric approach to Remote Procedure Calling, built on top of reflectionless kotlinx.serialization, coroutines and ktor. Safe and elegant.

It works like this. First, the API is described with pure Kotlin, as an interface. Then, kotlin-rpc's build-time logic kicks in and generates clients and server stubs. It works over HTTP (e. g. calling a JVM server from a JS client), but other medium is possible, like Web workers (communication between the main UI thread and the worker thread).

Installation

In build.gradle.kts with your API, add my private repo:

repositories {
    maven {
        url = uri("https://dl.bintray.com/krzema1212/it.krzeminski")
    }
}

add kotlin-rpc to dependencies, together with adding custom source sets in build directory:

...
val jvmMain by getting {
    dependencies {
        ...
        implementation("it.krzeminski.kotlinrpc:kotlin-rpc:[put-newest-version-here]")
    }
    kotlin.srcDirs(kotlin.srcDirs, "$buildDir/jvm/generated/")
}
val jsMain by getting {
    dependencies {
        ...
    }
    kotlin.srcDirs(kotlin.srcDirs, "$buildDir/js/generated/")
}
...

and define tasks to execute the entry points:

val generateJsProxy = tasks.register<JavaExec>("generateJsClient") {
    group = "build"
    description = "Generate JS proxy"
    classpath = sourceSets["main"].runtimeClasspath
    main = "it.krzeminski.kotlinrpc.api.generation.JsClientGenerationKt"
    args("it.krzeminski.zoo.api.ZooApi", "$buildDir/js/generated")
}

val generateJvmKtorServer = tasks.register<JavaExec>("generateJvmKtorServer") {
    group = "build"
    description = "Generate JVM Ktor server"
    classpath = sourceSets["main"].runtimeClasspath
    main = "it.krzeminski.kotlinrpc.api.generation.JvmKtorServerGenerationKt"
    args("it.krzeminski.zoo.api.ZooApi", "$buildDir/jvm/generated")
}

tasks.getByName("jvmJar").dependsOn(generateJvmKtorServer)
tasks.getByName("jsJar").dependsOn(generateJsProxy)

This is all pretty complicated, and is going to be simplified in scope of #13.