Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Dart from Google, a structured web programming language

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

Google has just released the first public version of Dart, a new language, meant for what they call "structured web programming".

They had announced that they were working on Dart some weeks / months earlier.

The Dart language site is here: http://www.dartlang.org

It has an introduction to Dart, and links to a tutorial and a technical overview, among other things.

There is already a Dart thread on Hacker News, with tons of comments, some pro, some con:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3092558

Google says that the language can be used in most modern browsers - Chrome, Safari 5+, Firefox 4+, as well as on servers.

The site http://www.dartlang.org/ currently has an app called Dartboard.

Dartboard allows you to run a few sample snippets of Dart code.

It also lets you modify them and then run the modified versions.

I tried out the 4 or so sample Dart snippets in a recent Chrome version.

All samples worked. But running the code seemed to trigger web requests, even though the code itself was not doing anything web-related, as far as I know.

Not sure why, as of now. Possibly it is because the Chrome version I used does not yet support Dart, so clicking Run may be sending a request to the server to compile the Dart code into JavaScript and send it back to the browser to be run - Google does say that that is the way in which Dart will be able to run on browsers that _do not_ have explicit support for it.

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- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

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