In October, stable|kernel CEO Joe Conway and VP of Engineering Ross Hambrick debuted Aqueduct, our server-side web framework written in Dart, at Google’s Dart Developer Summit 2016. For two days, #dartlang enthusiasts worldwide tuned in and showed up to celebrate all things Dart and learn more about Google’s plans for this powerful and productive programming language.
Though Google’s Dart language may have not generated much buzz in recent months, TechCrunch heralded last week’s summit as that which “marks Dart’s return into the spotlight.” Dart is powering a lot of Google’s revenue-generating platforms including AdWords and AdSense. Writer Frederic Lardinois goes on to say: “Inside of Google, Dart is also now the fastest growing programming language, and the number of lines of Dart code written by Google developers has increased by 3.5x over the course of the last year.”
Google is committed to growing the platform. According to Google’s Dart Evangelist Filip Hráček, “Google has bet its biggest business on Dart — the web apps built on Dart bring over $70B per year.”
Dart Developer Summit 2016 Takeaways
Joe Conway: “Dart is continually improving and the Google team is putting lots of effort into it. Dart will be a big deal, it’s just a matter of time.”
Faisal Abid: “The most important piece of information that I left with after #dartsummit was how productive @dart_lang making developers. 3-5x!”
Some of the highlights include:
AngularDart 2.0 – Maybe the biggest announcement of the Google developer summit was the release of AngularDart 2.0. The web app framework features enhanced performance, bug fixes and API improvements. The Dart team had also worked to speed up the language’s development cycle and make it easier to integrate with existing JavaScript libraries. “In the past 4 months, AngularDart’s output has gotten 40% smaller, and our AngularDart web apps got 15% faster.” The exciting news for developers is new components like material design widgets.
stable|kernel software engineer Erik Rahtjen used AngularDart 2.0 (which he upgraded from the beta) to build a simple single page web application. “AngularDart needs to come into maturity but once it does, I believe it will be a more enjoyable, productive environment for web app production than I have ever seen before,” says Erik. “It’s first in its class for pleasure and productivity if you are willing to look past some of the teething issues it is having as the technology matures. Definitely excited about it and will watch with bated breath to see how it moves forward.”
Related: How to Bootstrap Your Angular Dart App with Github Pages
Flutter – It’s actually a pretty great approach to building natively for iOS and Android using a single codebase written in Dart. The platform utilizes widgets to allow developers to build a UI much faster than previously available with Dart. And the platform promotes Google’s Material Design approach which just added a ton of new tools to its suite. You can take a tour of Flutter here. Also, follow Seth Ladd, Flutter’s evangelist, on Twitter for breaking Flutter news.
stable|kernel VP of Engineering Ross Hambrick is excited about Flutter. After the Flutter keynote, Ross tweeted: “Flutter is looking pretty powerful these days. #dartsummit”
Frontend web developers got a look at several new or updated tools such as strong mode, Dart’s type system, updated Dart Dev Compiler and Dart-to-JS interoperability. Fellow Summit attendee Jana Moudra says: “The JS interop talk is definitely a “must see” if you consider writing a wrapper around some existing JS library.” I also love her 3D printed Dart earrings!
Interested in reading more about the Dart Summit? Read more from Filip Hráček’s Dart Summit recap here.
Tweeted by @sethladd: Really cool artwork from #dartsummit, from inside the Google office cafe 🙂 cc @_twothirty
Aqueduct, a server-side Dart web framework
While Dart had all of the fundamentals and a great standard library to support building web server applications, no one had built a cohesive tool like Ruby on Rails, or .NET and the Entity framework. We were looking to combine the productivity of tools like those with the Dart platform together for the ultimate programming experience. So that’s where Aqueduct comes in. Out of 17 talks at the Summit, only one focused on using Dart on the server – and that was delivered by stable|kernel CEO Joe Conway.
Related: Why we chose to build Aqueduct for Dart
Here are Aqueduct’s sexiest features:
- HTTP Request Routing.
- Multiple CPU support, without adding complicated multi-threading logic.
- CORS Support.
- Automatic OpenAPI specification/documentation generation.
- OAuth 2.0 implementation.
- Fully-featured ORM, with clear, type- and name-safe syntax, and SQL Join support. (Supports PostgreSQL by default.)
- Database migration tooling.
- Template projects for quick starts.
- Integration with CI tools. (Supports TravisCI by default.)
- Integrated testing utilities for clean and productive tests.
- Logging.
Want to build your first native web server in Dart? Go through the tutorials here. If you missed Joe’s talk, you can watch it here:
To learn more about our open-source, web framework Aqueduct click below!
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