

Start — Dart web framework inspired by Sinatra - lvivski
https://github.com/lvivski/start

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lucisferre
Really rooting for Dart personally, but I'm going to watch for the sidelines
and stick with Rails, Ruby and Coffeescript for a while longer.

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taylorlapeyre
Interesting. Haven't seen many Dart projects so far.

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Ovid
I have to confess that after read through the Dart specs, all I could think
was "meh". Google had a chance to throw their weight behind some powerful
language advancements, but all I saw was a boring Java/Javascript hybrid. And
given that Dart will never be natively embedded in Safari or IE, it's going to
be very hard to get traction on it.

I suspect that's why you haven't seen many projects in Dart.

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kyrra
Agreed, the language syntax itself is very boring. Listening to talks from
their language designers, I think they are even annoyed a little that they
can't do more interesting things with the syntax. I've been following dart for
a while now, and here's the feel I get from the language:

* Dart's goal is not to explore exciting new syntax, it's about giving developers a language that can quickly start being productive on.

* Cleaning up a lot of the messy syntax that exist in Javascript today.

* Be able to easily and _efficiently_ compile to Javascript. This seems to be the reason for a lot of the language syntax decisions.

* Provide a full development experience (language, tools, ui, etc...) out of the box.

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tadfisher
A very important feature is class-based object orientation, which the vast
majority of developers are familiar with, thus it is more natural to use
compared to prototype-based OO.

Also, tool-visible types allow for better/easier tool-assisted development,
something that has been a stumbling block even in the most monstrous of IDEs.
For example, ever ctrl-clicked a function assigned to a var in Eclipse?

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kyrra
yup. No prototype inheritance is huge, plus having a single entry point for an
app is huge. These 2 provide a lot of VM optimization opportunities.

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mapleoin
Loving the test suite.

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lvivski
:) well I have no test for now, but there will be test for route parsing and
other stuff.

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andyl
Dart is Google's attempt to kill off another OpenWeb technology. This time
their sights are trained on Javascript. Dart : Javascript :: Reader : RSS

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kyrra
Dart at this point is being directed by Google, but it is totally open source.
So if Google decided they wanted to stop working on it, you would still be
free to do what you'd like with it.

The Dart code[1], which includes the VM, dart2js, editor, analyzer, and all
libraries are under new BSD license. The entire contents of the dartlang.org
website are even on Github[2] under Creative Commons, so you can submit pull
requests to have any page on the website updated.

While it's direction is being decided by Google, they are taking a lot of
input from the community via the mailing lists and bug submissions. Though, it
is not driven by committee like EMCAScript is, I'm ok with that for now. I
believe when Dart was originally launched they said they would consider
submitting the language as an ISO standard once it has become more stable,
which may still happen.

[1] <https://code.google.com/p/dart/>

[2] <https://github.com/dart-lang/dartlang.org>

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sethladd
[disclaimer, I work on the Dart team]

Yes, one of the long term goals of the language is standardization. The
project is open source, we have external committers, and we've taken numerous
patches. Pull Requests welcome!

~~~
coldtea
Since you're on the Dart team, something I always wanted to say re: Dart.

The main chance I see for the language getting adoption is to start from the
server side, if Google could sponsor a full featured web framework in the
language with async capabilities, talking to major DBs, and other batteries.
Basically a Dart Rails or Django (maybe a little scaled back in the
beginning).

Sure, you can let the community create several competing frameworks, like this
one. But nothing will get traction like a Google-backed, with 1-2 full time
employees behind it, nice documentation et al.

