InfoQ Homepage Presentations Dart: A Structured Web Programming Language
Dart: A Structured Web Programming Language
59:17
Summary
Gilad Bracha introduces Dart, Google’s new language for the web, explaining the reasons behind its conception, what it is and what it is not, some of the main features, and unveiling plans for the future.
Bio
Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages.
About the conference
QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for team leads, architects and project management. The program includes two tutorial days led by over 80 industry experts and authors and three conference days with 18 tracks and over 80 speakers covering a wide variety of relevant and exciting topics in software development today. There is no other event in the US with similar opportunities for learning, networking, and tracking innovation occurring in the enterprise software development community.
Dec 23, 2011
Community comments
Compare with GWT?
by Vijay Nathani,
Re: Compare with GWT?
by Faisal Waris,
Re: Compare with GWT?
by Joao Pedrosa,
Echos of Visual Basic
by Polly Shaw,
Compare with GWT?
by Vijay Nathani,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
How does Dart compare with GWT? One difference is GWT is Java compiled to JavaScript, Dart is a new language compiled to JavaScript. Under what circumstances would I prefer one over another?
Re: Compare with GWT?
by Faisal Waris,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
The real motivation behind Dart is to make it run natively in the browser (not via javascript).
Today it’s hard to deliver a large amount of code to the browser using javascript source files.
Ironically, Dart's mission is very close to Java's original mission.
Java/GWT don't really embrace HTML/DOM other than to use that as a delivery vehicle for applications. I suspect Dart will be a better HTML citizen just like javascript is today.
Also, Java is showing its age. Dart is a multi-paradigm language supporting OO, functional and Actor paradigms (like many other contemporary languages).
If Dart never takes off other than just as a source language for javascript then it would be a waste. Better still Google should focus on the VM under Dart and make that directly addressable so that any language can be ported to run on the web - not just Dart or javascript.
See also comments on this InfoQ article: www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/scala-gwt
Re: Compare with GWT?
by Joao Pedrosa,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
GWT is more of a framework. Dart has a larger scope than that of a usual framework even if some of Dart may also work as a framework.
With a DartVM, running Dart in a browser for development purposes if not for deployment purposes will also help to speed up the usual process of edit a file, reload the page to see the changes. GWT presently seems to take over several seconds to test the changes.
There's a potential to use the DartVM to power application deployments in the Android devices. So you don't need to compile it all to JavaScript to run, necessarily.
As both GWT and Dart make for good frameworks, you may use either one if you so wish.
Dart is sort of the future. GWT is the established and successful present. Eventually, the toolkits available to GWT will also be available to Dart so the differences will be blurred even more.
Cheers,
Joao
Echos of Visual Basic
by Polly Shaw,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I feel uneasy with the decision to appeal to intuitive understanding rather than logical correctness regarding the covariance of generic types because I'm afraid it may result in more confusion rather than less. I remember that VB<=6 had arrays that were 1-based by default for the same reason, but as this behaviour could be overridden and some developers preferred 0-based arrays it led to confusion over whether any particular array was 1-based or 0-based.