Currently writing this post in beautiful Port Alberni, BC, a city known for… stuff, probably. And this old dog who came to see me asking for scratches. I took a few days off from work to spend time with my partner before she goes on a road trip. While work hasn’t been particularly stressful, it’s nice to take some time to recharge.
Once again I missed a few weeks, but I got a lot done and posted a few blog posts, so I don’t really feel bad about it. For the past few weeks, I had a lot of extra-scholar activities that kept me busy. Most of them came to a conclusion this last week.
I’ve always been pretty adament that handling errors in your projects should not be an afterthought. This hasn’t changed, so I wanted to write a little post about error handling in your Ktor projects.
Ktor has become my go-to framework for all the projects I start these days. This week, I wanted to setup a simple API, so I went on the Ktor website and created a project with the extensions I needed. Except I made a mistake: I configured the project to use YAML instead of HOCON as the configuration format. It was an easy mistake to fix, but once I deployed my project… all hell broke loose and nothing made sense anymore.
A long long time ago, in a galaxy country far away, a young student was doing his final group presentation. They’d built a multiplayer fighting game that would run on the Nintendo DS (it was a long time ago) and web/desktop using Flash (long long time ago!). On one of the presentation slide, they mentioned that they’d used an XML database to store games data, which one of the judge took interest in. That student was quick on his feet, so he replied that it was super convenient because you could just query data, get pre-formatted XML back and send it directly to the clients. That was me, I was that student and it was complete bullshit. We’d given up on using an XML database a long time ago and decided to go back to MySQL, I’d just forgotten to update the schema in our slides. This blogpost has nothing to do with XML, but I’ve used Postgres to store JSON data recently, and it made me think about this story. Anyway, let’s dig in.