Dart and front end development

Welcome, Chris. I read Dart in Action under the MEAP program and I found it well worth reading. There may be some wizened old Java programmers out there who still think of front-end development as separate from, and inferior to, sho'nuff application development. It seems that they are in for an awakening, coming sooner or later. Both Dart and your treatment of it offer good reason to begin to see web app development more holistically.

Thanks for writing the book. I've never been "in on" a language so early in its lifespan, and I'm interested to watch this unfold.

Rick

Rick Goff wrote:There may be some wizened old Java programmers out there who still think of front-end development as separate from, and inferior to, sho'nuff application development. It seems that they are in for an awakening, coming sooner or later.so early in its lifespan, and I'm interested to watch this unfold.

I'd say that sooner is already here. Any developer who wants to work in the area of web development and is exclusively a server-side developer is already behind the eight ball*.

For those unfamiliar with the idiom "behind the eight ball", it means to be in a weak or losing position.

Hello, and Thanks!

It's interesting to watch this language grow - most other languages were released further into their development cycle, and Google have certainly not always gained great press by developing this language "in the open".

One of the great things about Dart is that you can take a server-side Java developer who's tried JavaScript and stepped away saying "don't take my tools away from me...", and put them in-front of Dart, with it's rich tooling (standalone editor, Eclipse plugin, or JetBrains IntelliJ / Webstorm plugin anyone?), traditional OO paradigms (but still with a splash of functional programming), and easy consistent access to the browser DOM, and they will "see the light" of web development open up in front of them*

(*Am I over-egging the pudding....?)

I have never heard of over-egging the pudding but I imagine the results would be sulfurous.

I agree that a compelling aspect of the Dart proposition is the single IDE for coding to both VM's (server and client), so to speak. That's a big deal. Can you comment on the development cycle in the context of Dartium/Chromium?

Can you comment on the development cycle in the context of Dartium/Chromium?

Once you have Dartium, then you can using any text editor, you would have an .html file and one/more .dart files. Press Save in the text editor, Press reload in Dartium to see the results (in other-words, a similar development cycle as with JavaScript).

Once you add the Dart Editor, though, you get extra goodies, as the Editor and Dartium have two way communication:
- Dartium logging to appear in the editor's log window
- CSS can be "live edited" in the editor, with the results instantly visible in Dartium
- You can set breakpoints in the Editor and step through code that is running in Dartium, viewing watched variables and stack tract

All this has the same workflow as any other text editor (ie, edit, save, reload), but with benefits.

While the editor is running, you can also copy/paste the URL to your app from Dartium into a non Dart browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE), and the Dart Editor will automatically convert your Dart code to JavaScript (including outputting source-maps).

(To over-egg one's pudding is to try to over-improve it)