Has anyone built something that illustrates Dart's features or made a neat web app with it? Can it handle graceful degradation from running in a browser which natively supports Dart to a browser which requires JS compilation?
We're getting there. People are starting to build frameworks and libraries, and there are a bunch of sample apps floating around. The language itself is still changing pretty quickly, so it's most amenable to early adopters. As things get more stable, I think we'll start to see more apps.
> Can it handle graceful degradation from running in a browser which natively supports Dart to a browser which requires JS compilation?
Yes. There's a canonical stub .js file that you add a script tag for on your page. That will detect whether or not the browser supports Dart and pull in either the native Dart code or the compiled-to-JS one as appropriate.
With this, you can write an app that any browser can hit and it will do the right thing.
We're using AngularJS on a large project, and although we haven't looked deeply at Dart yet, I still have a ton of questions in regard to their future compatibility, potential overlaps, roadmaps, etc. I've seen some message group posts about this, but there was nothing definitive and the core groups don't seem to collaborate at all (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Definitely check out Web Components. It's aiming to take many of the low-level features of the MV* frameworks, like templating and data binding, directly into the browser. Angular was created with a "what would HTML look like if we could extend it" idea, and Web Components is the "ok, let's add it to HTML now" response.
SDK looks cool to play with; tools are definitely where its at with this.
Dart (currently) doesn't seem to have any compelling use cases.
If people make tools with in build refactoring and other nice features that make productivity a compelling use case, maybe Dart has a chance to grow~
Still, given the tools that already exist for working on JS, there's still a long way to go before this will be enough to drag javascript developers over to dart...
I agree with the sentiment. However, I hesitate to embrace Dart, after Google killed off a huge number of APIs earlier this year. Go seems to have much more traction at Google so I think it is safe, but Dart still has an experimental feel to it. I'd like to hear a long-term commitment from Google to Dart before I really jump in.
From what I see, Go is not really meant for web development. I think Google's real bet on web and general app development will be Dart, as Go looks more like a C++ replacement. Also from the project page, I see like 80 people are committing to Dart so that sounds pretty promising ( https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list ).
Seriously just to get the source you have to run two downloaded programs, any linux besides Ubuntu requires extra work, and even still it comes with some pre-built 32-bit binaries which apparently are compiled as part of another project. It's madness.
They say it's so complicatd because Dart is part of Chromium, but Firefox has a direct hg link -plus- hg bundles (repository snapshot).
That's not how you get the source, that's how you prepare for building the whole project, including the VM, compiler, etc. If you just want the source code, just
That isn't terribly easy to find, though, it's true (you either have to have used google code before and know it's on the "checkout source" page or dig through those "get and build" instructions for just the "get" part).
The rest is just dependencies (and daunting at first, but pretty simple after you do any chromium work). You have to deal with the same thing if you check out Firefox and you want to build it (gclient here becomes bootstrap.py there).
