Thank you for Dart

[John Wells]

With all the negative comments/criticisms/challenges swirling around, I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank all those who are working on Dart. By day I'm the CIO of a $300M+ mid-size company...by night I still develop regularly. On the server-side use Java for 80% of what we do, and ruby/rails for the other 20%. I love java for its type-checking, speed and ease of code navigation...I love ruby for what is most of the time an incredibly productive development environment and language...*until* you need to track down bugs caused by type looseness or the open nature of classes (I've seen many libraries patch core classes which really shouldn't be meddled with and, consequently, cause interesting, difficult to track bugs). 

As CIO (and as a developer), I've become increasingly frustrated by web development...likely as many of you have as well. The necessary mix of server-side language/environment/libraries with the client-side mix of javascript and its never-ending variations of OOP, along with all of its legacy warts (this, anyone?), is extremely counter-productive. I've been hoping some capable group/company would take up the charge to solve this mess, and Google is just the company to do it. 

If Dart is able to maintain even a fraction of java's speed, combine that with the productivity of ruby, and in the meantime eliminate the need to write javascript on the client-side (and everything I've seen so far leads me to believe this will be true), I know of at least one company which will switch as soon as it becomes stable.

So keep up the great work and ignore the naysayers. I'm rooting for you.

John

[Gilad Bracha]

Thank you. Your comments are much appreciated. 

--
Cheers, Gilad

[Dan Diebolt]

I would like to add that I think Google and the dart developers have done a great job answering questions that have come up in this forum. I have learned a lot just reading each message and it is sort of exciting to use dart from the beginning. However the market develops, you guys are doing a great job building community in light of the fact it probably takes considerable time away from pure development activities.

[Bob Nystrom]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 6:28 PM, John Wells <john....@greatworx.com> wrote:

As CIO (and as a developer), I've become increasingly frustrated by web development...likely as many of you have as well. The necessary mix of server-side language/environment/libraries with the client-side mix of javascript and its never-ending variations of OOP, along with all of its legacy warts (this, anyone?), is extremely counter-productive. I've been hoping some capable group/company would take up the charge to solve this mess, and Google is just the company to do it. 

If Dart is able to maintain even a fraction of java's speed, combine that with the productivity of ruby, and in the meantime eliminate the need to write javascript on the client-side

This is an absolutely wonderful summary, I think, of where we're coming from and where we hope to be going to. Thanks for this!

- bob

[Todd Chambery]

I wish there was a way to "+1" this thread without commenting, but:

Totally agree, and thanks Dart team.

> switch *as soon* as it becomes stable.

[Alain Ekambi]

@John Wells if you enjoy  Java so much on the backend why not use GWT on the front-end. GWT aims fix all the issues you stated in your post. So why rooting for Dart ? 

Dont get me wrong. I like what i see from Dart so faar. I just dont understand why Dart was necessary when Google allready had GWT. 

To me this is  more  going away from Java/Oracle dependency then "fixing" JavaScript problems. 

2011/10/25 Todd Chambery <todd.c...@gmail.com>

--

GWT API for  non Java based platforms

http://www.emitrom.com/

http://gwt4touch.appspot.com/

http://gwt4flex.appspot.com/

http://code.google.com/p/gwt4air/

http://www.gwt4air.appspot.com/

[John Wells]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 6:37 AM, Alain Ekambi <jazzma...@googlemail.com> wrote:

@John Wells if you enjoy  Java so much on the backend why not use GWT on the front-end. GWT aims fix all the issues you stated in your post. So why rooting for Dart ? 

Dont get me wrong. I like what i see from Dart so faar. I just dont understand why Dart was necessary when Google allready had GWT. 

To me this is  more  going away from Java/Oracle dependency then "fixing" JavaScript problems. 

We actually do use GWT on all of our projects except for a few legacy ones. It's good...far better than the alternative for business applications. However, note that I listed three things I really like about java....the list of things I loathe is much, much longer. ;-)

[Fabio Kaminski]

For me, be able to develop c/c++ , on what its is good for (for the
hard part), and be able to embed a language like dart for the
"bussiness" stuff is just like a dream come true,

Before dart premiere, we can use just lua or javascript for this.. and
im already creating hybrid c++/dart software that can deploy not only
on the server side but also as a client side.. it just fit nicelly
everywhere..

and about the language design, it sums up a lot of nice idioms
elegantly, with simplicity and with the ability to create big peaces
of software.

so i just want to say thanks to!

[Stephen Haberman]

> We actually do use GWT on all of our projects except for a few legacy
> ones. It's good...far better than the alternative for business
> applications. However, note that I listed three things I really like
> about java....the list of things I loathe is much, much longer. ;-)

I'm also a GWT fan, and I'm hoping that Dart will make it that much
better.

I wrote more about it on my blog [1], but even though GWT's DevMode has
gotten much faster lately, as long as DevMode is debugging Java code
out-of-process in a JVM, there will always be a non-zero cost for JVM
<-> JS/DOM interop.

So I think it will be really interesting to see how GWT evolves with
Dart--whether as a new backend to GWT's existing Java front end (with
an in-browser-process DevMode FTW), or if the Dart ecosystem itself ends
up providing all/most of GWT's use cases/features.

But, yeah, Java syntax is less-than-ideal; I've been contributing to
the scala-gwt project and, since the dart announcement, have been
mulling over what a scala-dart project might look like. I'm not
smart enough to pull it off, but it's fun to think about. Hence my
previous post about the Dart VM's transpiling support.

- Stephen

[1]: http://draconianoverlord.com/2011/10/03/reaction-to-dart.html

[Filip Hostiuc]

Nobody could've said this better. Yesterday I have read an article
along the lines: Dart will miss its target. I actually believe that
Dart might hit the target in the middle.

I hope to see a flexible combination of Dart and HTML5 in a web based
IDE, something that removes much of the headaches of current web
development. Go Google Team !!!

Filip

> switch *as soon* as it becomes stable.