cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21390036

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???)

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Unrelated, but if you want you can also share your opinion regarding the use of Compose vs JavaFX vs Swing for this situation