Aqueduct - a server-side web framework written in Dart

On the Dart summit last month, Joe Conway gave a great talk about Aqueduct, a server-side web framework written in Dart by stable|kernel. We asked Sarah from stable|kernel to write a blogpost as well. — Filip Hráček

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After spending a year building Aqueduct in a relative vacuum, the stable|kernel team went into the Dart Summit with a lot excitement! Finally, we got to share our server-side web framework with the community it was built for: web and mobile developers who want to build an entire stack in Dart. If you missed stable|kernel CEO Joe Conway present Aqueduct at the Dart Summit, you can watch it here.

Our team began exploring Dart about 18 months ago and we quickly realized the potential for supercharging our team’s productivity due to Dart’s power and speed. In October 2015 Joe wrote: “It is important to us and our clients that we use platforms that allow for a high degree of productivity, testability and maintainability. In order to identify a platform that we could become experts in that also delivered on these three things, we set out to evaluate the web server platform landscape and find a platform that fit our needs.”

What appealed to us most about Dart:

• Easily deployable, stand-alone virtual machine
• An incredible set of libraries for building web servers
• Asynchronous programming and reflection
• A simple, elegant language that Swift, Objective-C and Java programmers would love

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 a the ultimate programming experience. So that’s where Aqueduct comes in.

The purpose of Aqueduct is to provide a foundation to build full-stack solutions quickly, but without sacrificing long-term sustainability. All of the typical features necessary for a web server application are available out of the box.

Some of the highlights:

• Easy integration with CI tools
• OAuth 2.0 Implementation and Endpoints
• Logging
• An ORM that makes writing queries more productive, but doesn’t get in your way.
• Automatic OpenAPI specification generation
• High quality documentation to quickly get the most out of Aqueduct
• Tooling for database migration

You can take a look at additional features here and check out the tutorials here.

— Sarah Woodward, stable|kernel