Is Dart "... A Great Technology On The Road To Nowhere?"

[Michael Chean]

Just a heads up:

Article by Bart Read at Simple Talk:

http://goo.gl/YQPMH

[Jos Hirth]

The amount of money we make selling to customers using older browsers vastly outweighs the amount of money we spend on maintaining our site to support them. That’s even true for IE7, which only accounts for a seemly pitiful 1.2% of the traffic to our site, but it’s true: we make much more money out of customers using IE7 than we spend supporting their antiquated, broken-down old web browser that they really should replace.

Supporting old browsers is an investment. There might be some return thereof and you even might break-even, but that doesn't mean that this was the best investment you could have made.

I know of one company which managed to increase their revenue by more than 100% just with front-end performance optimizations.

Supporting old versions of IE is generally more work than taking care of basic optimizations.

Another thing is marketing. Virtually no one heard of your product/service. Getting twice as many people on your site will be way more useful than making those 10% with IE8 happy.

Support for legacy browsers should be the last thing on your list. It's the least interesting one. The payoff is tiny (and it even decays over time) and it also makes maintenance more expensive.

That’s great but, if your site has an MVC back-end, and you’re used to working in Visual Studio for both front and back-end, you’re somewhat on your own. There’s no tooling for Visual Studio [...] it’s going to break your workflow.

There also isn't any tooling with JavaScript, SCSS, or Handlebars templates. Well, I really don't see the problem. You can run several IDEs simultaneously. PCs are surprisingly powerful these days and RAM is also dirt cheap.

You’re developing a single page app (I’d say avoid it for multi-page for now)

I'm not really sure why he thinks that it's only usable for SPAs. for example, you can also create a bunch of independent widgets which can communicate via events (see: Nicholas Zakas - Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture). You can also use it for games, for server-sided stuff, or command line tools. You can also embed the VM in other applications and then use Dart for scripting.

[Ruud Poutsma]

Dart is for the next 2 decades, of which the first has not yet started. Supporting IE9 therefore seems pretty conservative to me.

;)

Op dinsdag 30 april 2013 00:38:22 UTC+2 schreef Michael Chean het volgende:

[Matthew Butler]

He needs to do more research. Just because you find statistics doesn't make them accurate. (About market share)

His source:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/01/internet-explorer-continues-growth-past-55-market-share-thanks-to-ie9-and-ie10-as-chrome-hits-17-month-low/

Another source:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp 

And Another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

And yet another:
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2013&month=2

None of them are even close to each other. But only his one example put IE at 55% market share. That in itself shows me he's more worried about enforcing his view rather than objectively reviewing Google's technology or their Google's reasoning for choosing the targets they set for compatibilities.

Matt

[Jim Trainor]

The author's concerns address only Dart's suitability for his particular application and his discomfort about how it will adapts to his preferred development environment.  The article makes no points that speak to Dart's raison d'être.

[Jim Trainor]

BTW, for those who may not be aware:

Chrome Frame is solution for running modern (dart2js generated) javascript in older versions of IE:

http://www.google.com/chromeframe?hl=en&prefersystemlevel=true