Since the first public release of Dart in 2011, the language evolved a lot. Its first stable release in November 2013 marked the point when it was the time to start taking it seriously in the production environment. Dart 1.9+ might, at first sight, look like what JavaScript could be if it was designed for today's Web. It combines the best of many other languages while targeting both browser and server-side development.
Dart isn't the answer to every problem on the Web. There are situations where it seems like it's overly complicated to use Dart or it just isn't good at what you need, and you might be right. There are circumstances where it's better to use JavaScript.
This book tries to be objective. We won't try to convince you that from now on, you should use only Dart, and we'll talk about situations where Dart isn't the ideal solution. At the same time, we'll show you where Dart is great, how you can write well-structured code for both the browser and the server, and how easy it is to write understandable asynchronous apps with Dart 1.9.
Even though this book can't go into great detail about each topic, after reading this book, you should see for yourself that Dart makes sense and you should at least give it a try. It's not just the language but also the IDE, comfortable debugger, dependency management, runtime profiler, and more.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Dart, jumpstarts Dart development right away while explaining the syntax and core features of Dart.
Chapter 2, Practical Dart, focuses on the most common tasks of client-side development, such as DOM manipulation, asynchronous programming, Ajax calls, and using existing JavaScript code in Dart and vice versa.
Chapter 3, The Power of HTML5 with Dart, specifically focuses on using HTML5 features in Dart while mentioning some noteworthy third-party libraries written for Dart.
Chapter 4, Developing a Mobile App with Dart, builds on the previous chapter with a quick explanation of CSS3 transformations and HTML5 features specific for mobile devices.
Chapter 5, Web Components and polymer.dart, goes step by step, showing each part of Web Components standard and how useful they are, even when used separately. Then, it looks at polymer.dart, which combines all parts of Web Components into a single framework.
Chapter 6, AngularDart, is a sneak peak of a superheroic framework for Dart made by Google with the same philosophy in mind as AngularJS.
Chapter 7, Server-side Applications with Dart, shows that apart from the browser environment, there's also a standalone Dart VM, which can run on a server. We'll take a very practical look at writing server-side scripts, including server configuration for Apache and nginx web servers.
Chapter 8, Testing and Profiling the Dart Code, states that just as with any other language, unit testing is a vital part of the development process. Dart also comes with a built-in tool called Observer to examine Dart VM's internals in runtime.
Chapter 9, Writing Native Extensions for the Standalone Dart VM, shows the full potential of Dart, by writing native extensions for the standalone Dart VM in C/C++ and then using them from Dart.
The only software you need is the Dart SDK. Right now, it's available for all recent releases of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux.
In Chapter 9, Writing Native Extensions for the Standalone Dart VM, we'll also need a C/C++ compiler, ideally GCC, which is free. This is actually optional; you don't need it if you don't want to try the examples for yourself.
This book is intended for developers with prior knowledge of programming in any OOP language, with a reasonable background in web development and decent experience with JavaScript.
We're not going to go through basic programming constructs, such as conditionals, loops, boolean expressions, and similar things, which are common to all languages.
Also, we're not going to explain concepts of OOP.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Reddit API allows us to set a custom callback with the jsonp parameter."
A block of code is set as follows:
import 'dart:html';
main() {
print("Hello, world!");
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<input type="time" ng-model="newTask['when']"> <input type="text" ng-model="newTask['title']"> <button type="button" ng-click="addTask(newTask['when'], newTask['title'])"> Add</button>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# dart bin/server.dart -p 8889
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Emulation tab, click on Sensors and you should see three input fields, each for one axis."
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