Kotlin cozies up to Spring Framework

JetBrains is deepening its collaboration with the Spring platform team, with the goal of making the Kotlin language a top choice for professional server-side work.

The JetBrains-Spring partnership, announced May 22, is intended to make Kotlin a more natural and powerful choice for building Spring applications, JetBrains said. Spring is a well-established framework for developing enterprise Java applications. 

As part of the partnership, JetBrains is building a newer and faster version of its reflection library, kotlinx.reflect, to improve performance in scenarios relying heavily on reflection, such as serialization and dependency injection.

Key areas of the collaboration include:

Providing null safety for Kotlin and Spring apps by improving Kotlin support for null safety across the framework. This will strengthen type safety in Kotlin code.

Delivering the new Bean Registration DSL (domain-specific language) to provide a foundation for better support for lambda and DSL-based bean definition.

Making Core Spring learning materials available in Kotlin.

Kotlin already shines building Spring applications, JetBrains said, thanks to features like named and default parameters, which remove the need for the builder pattern and other overload-related boilerplate. Kotlin also encourages modular design through the use of extension functions and top-level functions, according to the company. The Spring team, meanwhile, has supported Kotlin features such as coroutines, Kotlin extensions, and configuration DSLs. So far, 27% of Spring developers have used Kotlin, JetBrains said.