Getting started with Ktor

You're probably tired of creating to-do or shopping lists.

So, instead, in this chapter, the microservice will be for a cat shelter. The microservice should be able to do the following:

• Supply an endpoint we can ping to check whether the service is up and running
• List the cats currently in the shelter
• Provide us with a means to add new cats

The framework we'll be using for our microservice in this chapter is called Ktor. It's a concurrent framework that's developed and maintained by the creators of the Kotlin programming language.

Let's start by creating a new Kotlin Gradle project:

1. From your IntelliJ IDEA, select File | New | Project and choose Kotlin from New Project and Gradle Kotlin as your Build System.
2. Give your project a descriptive name – CatsHostel, in my case – and choose Project JDK (in this case, we are using JDK 15):

   Figure 10.1 – Selecting the Project JDK type...