Dart News & Updates

With today's milestone release, Dart is faster and more productive. Performance from generated JavaScript code is up, Dartium added a REPL, and Dart Editor has better HTML/CSS editing and a new pub package browser. dart2js generates faster JavaScript from Dart Thanks to a new type inference engine in the dart2js translator, some benchmark scores went up >100% since the previous milestone release. See dartlang.org/performance for the latest performance numbers. New HTML/CSS editors in Dart Editor Dart Editor has new HTML and CSS editors that improve the web app authoring experience. If you edit HTML or CSS, you will now find: improved semantic highlighting of HTML and CSS elements  code completion / content assist  quick fixes / assists  code folding and enhanced navigation  hover info and hints  delimiter highlighting / bracket matching  Dart Editor now helps you find the right package for your app. Right-click on the package...

The Google Politics & Elections team launched a German federal elections  results map  powered by Dart , a new web programming language. Jason Brooks, a Google engineer that helped build the app, shares his experience using Dart: "We wanted to build a platform that would enable us to iterate quickly; to be flexible enough to allow us to experiment, while being robust enough to ensure the correctness of politically sensitive information. Dart has made it easy to build out a very capable platform. We are really excited about what we'll be able to do next." The application uses Google Maps to display results by district. Dart is used for the UI, and to draw the district boundaries. The Politics & Elections team wants "tools to help provide information about the federal election, but also offer a way to connect and engage with district-level candidates." It's great to see Dart being used to help the electoral process. Read more about the anno...

The fall conference season is starting, with Dart sessions in JavaScript, Java, and software conferences around the world. Some upcoming presentations: Blend , Oct 1-2, France Speaker: Sébastien Deleuze http://www.blendconference.com/schedule/le-langage-dart-le-futur-des-langages-de-programmation/ Softshake , Oct 24-25, Switzerland Speaker: Sébastien Deleuze http://soft-shake.ch/2013/program/sessions/13_web_dev/2013/10/24/7-Dart_one_language_to_rule_them_all.html GDG Seattle Devfest , Sept 27, Seattle, WA, USA Speaker: Emily Fortuna http://www.meetup.com/seattle-gdg/events/125948972/ JavaZone , Sept 11-12, Norway Speaker: Seth Ladd http://jz13.java.no/ dotJS , Dec 2, Paris, France Speaker: Lars Bak http://www.dotjs.eu/ JAZOON , Oct 22, Zurich Speaker: Paul Brauner http://jazoonvote.appspot.com/#/submissions/124 JAX , Oct 29, London Speaker: Chris Buckett http://jaxlondon.com/sessions/bringing-your-app-web-dart Devoxx , Nov 11-15, Belgium ...

With the new milestone release today, Dart has become more stable: we have fixed over 650 bugs since our last milestone release in June. Moreover, a reduced API churn in the core libraries and continuous improvement of the developer experience (e.g. in debugging) has improved the overall stability of the platform substantially. Reflection has been improved in the Dart VM. For example, reflectively performing a new invocation on an object is now 20 times faster. The VM, in addition to ia32 and x64, has also been ported to ARM and MIPS. Debugging performance was improved for stepping in both Dartium and standalone Dart VM. In particular, we have addressed debugger usability issues, such as: Stepping into closures, callbacks and emulated functions. Stepping across asynchronous invocations. Support for top level exception handling. In the Editor, the new analysis engine is now fully spec compliant. The Editor also provides hints on unused library imports and dead code, helping deve...

Ecma will hold a workshop on  Dart  on September 20, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, US. We encourage both members and nonmembers to let us know they are  interested in attending . In April 2013, Dart was proposed for standardization by Ecma International . In June 2013 at the Ecma General Assembly a successful presentation on Dart was held, a draft scope of work was proposed, and the topic of standardization was discussed. The Ecma GA has decided to progress with the project, and will hold the workshop on Dart before the October Ecma CC meeting. In the workshop we'll give a short introduction to Dart, set the direction for the possible future Dart work in Ecma, and discuss potential new features in Dart. Members of the Dart project, including Dart's "Chief Specification Officer" Gilad Bracha, will be in attendance. The workshop is a good opportunity to help drive the evolution of the Dart language. Please  register your interest  before September 6.

High-fives to team GlassFrogger, who used  Dart and HTML5 to win the Breaking Glass hackathon on August 18th, 2013. They ported the classic arcade game Frogger to Google Glass and its embedded web browser. "A lot of this was discovery...we wanted to see what we could exploit without having to write a native app. How can we reuse our code? We can write this once and deploy it anywhere [with Dart and HTML5].", said Adam Singer, developer on GlassFrogger. Hop  on over to the  video  of the demo pitch and a bit of game play.  Engadget and Robert Scoble  covered the winners, and were impressed by the effort. The game , while not complete, was built entirely during the 48-hour hackathon. Luckily, the Dart code is  open source  and you can try it with or without glass (try spacebar to move forward, not sure there's a move backward yet. Did we mention it's open source?) The Dart app is compiled to JavaScript, so that it can run across Glass and...

Dart libraries for both Google APIs and Protobufs are available for download. You can use Dart to access APIs from services such as Google+, YouTube, Drive, and more. You can also use Dart to interact with Protocol Buffers, Google's structured data encoding format. The libraries are open source and available today. The Dart client libraries for Google APIs cover a wide range of Google APIs . Each client library is bundled as a pub package and uploaded to pub.dartlang.org , Dart's package hosting service. For example, check out the Dart library for the YouTube API on pub . These libraries are maintained by a dedicated group of Dart community developers. Bonus: learn how to generate Dart client libraries for your own Cloud Endpoint service  in this post from the Dartwatch blog. Protocol Buffers , or protobufs, are a way to encode and decode structured data for interop between various systems. Both the protobuf runtime and code generator are available for Dart, and are o...