Shaping the future of web development

Conference given by Lars Bak at Devoxx 2013.

Nowadays, an ever growing part of the population don’t even bother to start any other application than a browser. More and more applications are web applications.

An obstacle to web applications is the development productivity.

Javascript is not a well structure language and lacks both complete and consistent libraries and tooling.

Dart is an answer to that issue.

Dart is a new structured language programming language. It comes with libraries, tooling and can be translated to javascript in order to be deployed on every modern browser. It also comes with its own library management system.

Dart is similar to Java in its abstraction mechanisms to Java, it should thus be very easy for a Java developer to write Dart code.

Dart uses extensively future-like structure, thus bringing a reactive programming style directly into the language.

The Dart editor (eclipse-based) supports errors highlights. This hould be a big advantage over plain javascript edition. The debugger works just as expected. Chromium has a native Dart VM built-in which which speeds up the development cycle by removing the need to redeploy the application: just reload the page.

Javascript and Dart code can be called from one another. Great point to migrate from a plain javascript application gradually.

Angular has ben ported to Dart: AngularDart. In the process, bith Dart and Angular were optimized to work together.

DartVM performance, compared to plain javascript or dart code translated to javascript is 1.5x to 2.2X as fast at runtime. But it is also, allegedly, 10x faster at startup.

There exist stable versions of Angular.dart and Polymer.dart.

A Dart VM should be built-in Chrome web browser rather shortly.

Links

• Angular.Dart a port of Angular.js to Dart
• Polymer.Dart a port of Polymer, a web component library
• streamy-dart a routing library to build single-page web applications
• route RPC framework