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Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

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Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a Danish city with 60.000 inhabitants, so we're a small team, and because of that we looked into flutter since it seems like an easy way to do mobile for people apt at c-like languages. We even had some internal talks about angularDart and flutter being comparable to react and reactNative. Our proof of concept wasn't that much of a hit though. Flutter integrates really, really well with Firebase, but being…

Why is the public sector in Europe staying away from Google but not Microsoft (Azure)?

One reason could be that from what I understand Azure licenses it's cloud software to other providers ("Azure Stack"), so you can get "Azure" run by a European company in an European data center, or even a state-owned one.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#22
post #2

I wouldn't be interested in Dart at all if it wasn't for Flutter. I can't help but wonder if there will be Flutter bindings implemented for other languages sometime.

That is the only way to keep Flutter relevant.

Right now, in what concerns iOS and Android, Qt and Xamarin also compile to native, use mature languages (JS, C++, C#, VB.NET, F#), can also target desktop and have an endless list of libraries to choose from.

Also Chrome team is quite interested in making PWAs succeed on mobile Web, and they have Microsoft on board with them, given how JavaScript has first class support on UWP.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a Danish city with 60.000 inhabitants, so we're a small team, and because of that we looked into flutter since it seems like an easy way to do mobile for people apt at c-like languages. We even had some internal talks about angularDart and flutter being comparable to react and reactNative. Our proof of concept wasn't that much of a hit though. Flutter integrates really, really well with Firebase, but being…

Why is the public sector in Europe staying away from Google but not Microsoft (Azure)?

Microsoft was a lot faster to accept and accompany our privacy terms. The EU data protection laws that you've seen all the fuzz about may be new for the private sector, but in much of the public sector we've actually been under much stricter requirements for years. If you have a big enough agreement with Microsoft, you can even have your data stored on servers you have physical access to and share with no-one else.

AWS was a little slower, but now meet the same requirements, pretty much. Other parts of the public sector is big in AWS instead of Azure.

Google only recently got into any type of real agreements with the EU on data protection, and they're still far from having national agreements. They also don't meet EU requirements on all their products, making it easier to blacklist all Google products than risk your GIS department using Google Maps or your PR department using Google analytics, both illegal for public usage.

For us personally we have more than 25 years of partnership with Microsoft, who have an excellent record on support. By contrast we've never really worked with Google, and we're not typically the ones to try new things. :) Especially not when we're happy with what we have, and since we already have a presence in Azure, I doubt we'll be expanding to another Cloud when pricing is pretty competitive between them. I mean, to run two clouds would also mean our operations crew would need to obtain security certifications for both, which is fairly expensive.

Technically and legally we could sign an agreement for Firebase in particular, and host our mobile apps with a Firebase backend, but as that's not likely to happen, Dart would need to become popular enough to integrate seamlessly and easily with Azure for us to use it.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#24
post #10
post #8

> The other is an interesting quality-of-life change for Flutter developers, which allows creating an instance of a class without the “new” keyword. The goal of this change is to make Flutter code more readable, less clunky, and easier to type, but the principle applies to all Dart code. There have been plenty of other improvements happening under the hood, as can be seen in the official changelog. To me it seems kin…

Server-side Dart is still there, but not getting a lot of support from Google, as it's not their primary focus. The renewed effort going into Dart because of flutter has also allowed AngularDart[0] to gain some of the benefits (better tooling and IDE integration). AngularDart 5 will actually be a huge quality-of-life improvement as they are killing the Dartium browser fork, and instead doing incremental-compiling to…

Right, I know there are still other uses of the language but it seems like the language design is focused solely on Flutter experience rather than just overall language experience. I don't recall ever seeing such a design decision in any other languages and I just find it a bit odd.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#25

Anybody using only dart for their mobile apps, how has been your experience with it? Where does it triumph & fail over RN??

Dart is a nice statically typed and compiled C-style language. If you have experience with another such language, it will feel like you already know Dart. The language compliments Flutter well, and the Flutter SDK makes it simple and easy to rapidly build a functional mobile app.

Lack of certain features, like reflection, in mobile Dart creates a rift in packages you can utilize in a Flutter app. There are a few warts in the type system, mainly around generics, and little things like the lack of union types and type aliasing.

There are also a few outstanding bugs that you might run into, which have had relatively long life since they were identified. The Dart team seems to be reluctant to add new features.

Also, managing state in Flutter is a little unclear: documents and videos from Google recommend four different ways to do so: explicitly calling setState(), Streams with StreamBuilder, scoped_model and the various third-party Dart/Flutter Flux implementations.

It definitely beats native development.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#26

Anybody using only dart for their mobile apps, how has been your experience with it? Where does it triumph & fail over RN??

Pros: * Flutter is faster. You really notice that for example the animations in flutter are much smoother than in RN * Flutter has really fast development cycle with hot reload ( * Writing UI only once for both iOS and Android * Better documentation * Better tooling support in editors (VSCode and Intellij) Cons: * The Flutter ecosystem is quite small, there are many lacking plugins * The Dart ecosystem is way smaller…

To add to this -

* Developing plugins (to use native code functionality) is fairly easy. I recently created a PDF viewer plugin for Android without any prior knowledge of java, in 2 days.

* Dart has smaller ecosystem but dart is a real language with a batteries included std library. I don't think I need to state the superiority of dart as a language.

* Flutter's non native components make it easier for you to customize them

* Flutter doesn't have an obvious way to use native views in apps. You can launch native views but compositing native and flutter views is a bit weird right now.

* The ease of use in the development cycle is phenomenal. Nothing like I've ever seen in UI dev.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#30

Anybody using only dart for their mobile apps, how has been your experience with it? Where does it triumph & fail over RN??

Pros: * Flutter is faster. You really notice that for example the animations in flutter are much smoother than in RN * Flutter has really fast development cycle with hot reload ( * Writing UI only once for both iOS and Android * Better documentation * Better tooling support in editors (VSCode and Intellij) Cons: * The Flutter ecosystem is quite small, there are many lacking plugins * The Dart ecosystem is way smaller…

Since there's so much competition in this area, hopefully this means Apple and Google will start to make this style of development a native part of their APIs and IDEs.
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