I finished reading the Kotlin documentation (§Concepts) and want to do something now. I was thinking about making a desktop app with a GUI. For that people seem to recommend Jetbrains Compose.
It seems however that the guides (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/kotlin-multiplatform-dev/compose-multiplatform-create-first-app.html) to set up such a project assume I have more than one target. I however don't and thus don't need to divide my project into common code, ios code, wasm code, etc. I only need to compile my project for the JVM, since I'm only intending to support Linux and BSD. I don't have much experience with the Java/Kotlin-centric build systems and I would like to avoid investing too much time into it (since for now I would like to spend more time writing that app, preferring to learn Gradle later in my journey), so I thought about just generating a template as recommended by the guides (using https://kmp.jetbrains.com/) and to just remove everything that doesn't matter for my project. However, since I don't have much experience with Gradle yet, I don't know what exactly the changes are that I need to make to the build script
Generated code
import org.jetbrains.compose.desktop.application.dsl.TargetFormat
plugins {
alias(libs.plugins.kotlinMultiplatform)
alias(libs.plugins.jetbrainsCompose)
alias(libs.plugins.compose.compiler)
}
kotlin {
jvm("desktop")
sourceSets {
val desktopMain by getting
commonMain.dependencies {
implementation(compose.runtime)
implementation(compose.foundation)
implementation(compose.material)
implementation(compose.ui)
implementation(compose.components.resources)
implementation(compose.components.uiToolingPreview)
implementation(libs.androidx.lifecycle.viewmodel)
implementation(libs.androidx.lifecycle.runtime.compose)
}
desktopMain.dependencies {
implementation(compose.desktop.currentOs)
implementation(libs.kotlinx.coroutines.swing)
}
}
}
compose.desktop {
application {
mainClass = "org.example.project.MainKt"
nativeDistributions {
targetFormats(TargetFormat.Dmg, TargetFormat.Msi, TargetFormat.Deb)
packageName = "org.example.project"
packageVersion = "1.0.0"
}
}
}
What resources should I look at to quickly create a kotlin Compose project targeting only the JVM? (maybe a gradle crashcourse????)
Unrelated, but if you want you can also share your opinion regarding the use of Compose vs JavaFX vs Swing for this situation