Dart News & Updates

AngularDart v4 is now available. We've been busy since the release angular2 v3.1.0 in May. Not only did we "drop the 2", but we also improved the compiler and tightened up the framework to give you smaller code, we updated the package structure to improve usability, and we added several new features. Check out the updated documentation to get started. Just angular Upgrading to v4 will require more than updating your version constraint. The package has changed names (back) to angular – dropping the 2. You'll need to update your pubspec.yaml and the corresponding imports in your code. In most instances, find-and-replace should do the trick. Going forward, the package will be called package:angular . We'll just update the version number. Smaller code The updated compiler in 4.0 allows type-based optimizations that not only improve runtime performance but generate better code because we are able to strongly type templates. A big result of the update is that...

Google I/O is happening in Mountain View this week. Here’s what you shouldn't miss if you're coming, or if you're following I/O from home. Figure 1: One of the Flutter apps that will be live-coded on stage. You will also be able to build it in one of the codelabs. Session: Prototyping to Production : Bridging the Gap with a Common Tool  by Fiona Yeung and David Yang Friday, 8:30am PDT Design and engineering collaboration is difficult but vital for iterative user-centered product development. Join us (a designer and UI developer) as we use the Flutter UI framework to evolve a UI concept from prototype to production code. You'll leave this talk with a deeper understanding of how to bridge the gap between designers and UI developers through a prototyping-centric workflow, and why using a single framework between designers and developers helps your team work more efficiently. Session: Single Codebase, Two Apps  with Flutter and Firebase  by Emily Shack ...

AngularDart 3.0 is now available. It brings better performance and smaller generated code, while also making you more productive. Version 3.0 is an evolution: although it has some breaking changes (detailed below), it is a smooth upgrade due to minimal public API adjustments. Most of the progress is under the hood—in code quality, stability, generated code size, performance, and developer experience. Code quality: 2731  instances of making the framework code more type safe (using sound Dart ). The AngularDart framework code size is down by 12% . Many additional style updates to the codebase: Changed to use idiomatic <T> for generic methods. Removed NgZoneImpl , all the code exists in NgZone now. Stability: Many CSS encapsulation fixes due to update with csslib package. Fixed bugs with IE11. Performance: For the Mail sample app, we see 30%  faster time-to-interactive (currently 3812 ms on a simulated 3G connection, measured via Lighthouse ). Our large ...

Another article about Dart from Istvan Soos is about Progressive Web Apps, published today . — Filip Hracek Have you ever tried to load a web application (maybe a game or a measurement converter) and couldn’t use it because the network was down? That’s an awful experience, but luckily we have the technology to make such apps available for our users. For most apps and games, this can be done with 3 lines of Dart code and 1 command in the terminal. In this short article I’ll guide you through the steps, and make sure that you can always play Pop, Pop, Win! Pop, Pop, Win! ( code ) — a Minesweeper implementation in Dart. Service workers A service worker is a JavaScript file that runs in the background. It can control the web page or the site it is associated with, intercepting and modifying navigation and resource requests, and caching resources in a very granular fashion. It is a non-intrusive web technology: service workers can improve the user experience if the browser suppor...

Lots of interesting articles about Dart have been cropping up on Medium.com lately. We've decided to cross post them here so that followers of this blog won't miss out on them. We'll start by Istvan Soos's GWT-to-Dart case study , published on Friday. — Filip Hracek Earlier this year I was asked if there’s a good way to compare developing web UIs in Google Web Toolkit  (GWT) vs. Dart , specifically AngularDart . Having worked with both GWT and Dart, I had a good idea of the differences, but as I thought more, I started to wonder how hard it would be to migrate a GWT application to AngularDart. This article describes what I’ve found while doing just that. The GWT Mail Sample  was an ideal place to start: it’s much more than a trivial example, with diverse features and complex UI interactions, yet it’s still manageable in size. If you’re in a hurry, take a look at the working demo  and the source code , or scroll to the bottom for the conclusions. Screenshot o...

AngularDart  got its own dedicated team 5 months ago. Last month, we launched 2.0 final on the Dart Developer Summit. Today, we’re releasing the first minor release after that: 2.1. Since the focus of AngularDart is Productivity, Performance, Stability , there are no major breaking changes (see the changelog ) — but a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements. Your apps will get slightly smaller and faster (even relative to 2.0 which already made huge strides in size and performance since the compiled-from-TypeScript days). Many features that AngularJS had to implement for JavaScript and TypeScript are not needed in Dart (because Dart already has those features out-of-the-box). So we’re removing them from AngularDart. Renderer is deprecated in favor of plain-old dart:html . NgPlural is going away — Dart programs can use the package:intl library. New components On the Dart Developer Summit, we launched AngularDart Components  — the material design widgets Google is using ...

Videos from last month’s Dart Developer Summit are up on YouTube  and we thought we’d cherry-pick the highlights for you. The summit keynote  is a summary of all the major news and of the direction the team is taking now. It’s where we announced that Dart is the fastest growing language at Google. Teams switching to Dart report up to twice the productivity and development speed of what they had previously. Next, AngularDart 2.0  was launched in a presentation  by Ferhat Buyukkokten and Matan Lurey. They showed how they made the framework’s output 40% smaller and 15% faster in the 4 months since AngularDart got its own dedicated team . They also showed our 60 fps table using setState(), and the new testing framework called NgTestBed. Later in the day, Ted Sander launched AngularDart Components  — the material design widgets Google is using in customer-facing apps like AdWords and AdSense. Hundreds of Google engineers work with these components ever...

Ferhat and Matan recently announced the release of AngularDart 2.0 with some pretty dramatic performance improvements at the Dart Developer Summit in Munich. We figured we’d have a chat with them to better understand — straight from the horse’s mouth — what this means for developers looking to write a web app. What is the single most important reason for people to try out the new AngularDart 2.0 release? That would be better performance. And really — as we talked about at the Dart Summit recently — AngularDart is mainly about providing developers with three things: Productivity, Performance, and Stability . AngularDart is an amazing framework for building web apps and we have internal teams reporting doubling their productivity. With the new release just out, AngularDart output is 40% smaller and 10% faster. Finally, with major teams depending on the framework for their products, we work hard to ensure stability throughout when implementing these improvements. Indeed, y...

AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by placing ads on your website. The team just launched a completely new version of their app for publishers. Read all about it here . We asked Daniel White, the tech lead for the project, some questions because the new UI happens to be built with Dart and Angular2. AdSense launched way back in 2003. How long is it since the last big redesign? Last big redesign was called ‘AdSense 3’ and launched about 6 years ago. It was written in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the UI has evolved through several iterations - but this is the first ground-up redesign in 6 years. There are a number of long-standing UX issues that we’ve taken the opportunity to solve. A big shout-out to our UX team who’ve been 100% behind this project. We couldn’t have done it without them! How many software engineers worked on the project? Purely on the AdSense applications, we have a team of close to 100. Around 25% of them write Dart. How many lines of code? We have a...

The Dart Developer Summit is only 5 weeks ahead, and we’re excited about its agenda: 17 talks, many demos, 25 speakers, plus a lightning talks session and a panel discussion. Expect the full program soon on the site, but here’s a teaser: Major improvements to the type system Much better interoperability with JavaScript Improved developer workflow AngularDart 2.0 And much more We will share more details as we approach the summit. Because the TypeScript flavor of Angular just released  version 2.0 last week, we think it’s a good opportunity to share more details about AngularDart 2.0. Besides the changes you’d expect, such as faster execution and reduced size (on which we’re already making a lot of progress ), we will also have a better template compiler and some nice surprises for you. The beta releases of AngularDart have been in production use at Google since January, in MLOC-sized apps. This has helped us to see what works well for large apps, and to improve...

Until now, the multiple language flavors of Angular 2 were written as TypeScript source, and then automatically compiled to both JavaScript and Dart. We're happy to announce that we’re splitting the Angular 2 codebase into two flavors – a Dart version and a TypeScript/JavaScript version – and creating a dedicated AngularDart team. This is amazing news for Dart developers because: The framework will feel more like idiomatic Dart. It will make use of Dart features that couldn't work with the TypeScript flavor. It will be faster. This is equally great news for our TypeScript and JavaScript developers, by the way. Cleaner API, performance gains, easier contributions. Read more on the Angular blog. Angular 2 for Dart is used by many teams at Google. Most famously by the AdWords team, but many other Google teams build large, mobile-friendly web apps. Some of the top requests from these teams were: make the API feel like Dart, provide a faster edit-refresh cycle, and ...

Google just announced a re-designed AdWords experience. In case you’re not familiar with AdWords: businesses use it to advertise on google.com and partner websites. Advertising makes up majority of Google’s revenue, so when Google decides to completely redo the customer-facing front end to it, it’s a big deal. The Dart team is proud to say that this new front end is built with Dart and Angular 2. Whenever you asked us whether Google is ‘even using Dart for anything,’ this is what we had in mind but couldn’t say aloud. Until now. We asked Joshy Joseph , the primary technical lead on the project, some questions. Joshy is focusing on things like infrastructure, application latency and development velocity, so he’s the right person to ask about Dart.   Q: What exactly did we launch on Monday? It’s a complete redesign of the AdWords customer experience that is rolling out slowly as a test to a small initial set of advertisers. The most noticeable thing is probably the Material Design ...

Cross-post from the Angular blog. Google is always busy building new web apps, and recently a lot of that development is using Angular 2 for Dart . Just last week, the Google Fiber team launched Google’s first production Angular 2 app, written in Dart. Take a look at their just-launched Angular 2 for Dart app: The Fiber team has lots of company within Google—Angular 2 for Dart is being quickly adopted by many other Google teams. Dart is an open-source development platform from Google that makes web and mobile development more productive. The Dart language is a concise yet expressive language that’s familiar to developers coming from Java, C#, ActionScript, and JavaScript. The Dart platform gives you an instant edit-debug cycle, great core libraries, a canonical package manager, a powerful semantic analyzer, and IDE support via IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm. You can run Dart code compiled to JavaScript on all modern browsers. We’ve worked closely with the Angular team as...