Dart is a new programming language that has been developed by Google.Google has created the language to solve some of the issues that exist in JavaScript.The specific reason for developing Dart is to make a modern language that is flexible, fast and useful in the creation of web-based applications, so it's an area of keen interest for a lot of developers, and users.
Dart - Structured Web Programming
The main reason for developing Dart is to make a modern language that's flexible, fast and useful in the creation of web-based applications, so it's an area of interest for a lot of developers and users.
Issues with JavaScript and Ajax technologies
JavaScript wasn't really created with the idea of making complicated web applications; it was designed for manipulating the DOM (Document Object Model) or, in other words, for messing around primarily with the display/interface part of the application. It wasn't really designed with foreknowledge of the tasks that are now expected of it.
Background of Issue
Before the current generation of web applications, if you wanted to do remote processing on a task, you used a client/server model. The client would connect to the server and they would exchange information, typically with the client application handling input and display, and the server doing all the heavy processing. That's the thin-client world of computing as it was.
The trouble with this system is that keeping a connection to the server is 'expensive', tying up the resources of the server. The solution was to create a kind of stateless server model, which would perform a task and return the required information, and then forget about it - like a sort of online subroutine.
This means the consistency lies on the client side - the web app needs to remember what's going on, control the interface and such. As web applications have got more complex, this means more work. It's a bigger job than just rendering the information in a different font.
One of the lesser problems is that, while the user interface part of the application is in JavaScript, on the server side JavaScript isn't so good - nearly all applications are written in Java on the server side, or something similar. That doesn't seem like too much of a problem, but it's more annoying for the people who're trying to create web apps.
Also, JavaScript is fairly basic. Nearly all apps make use of a library such as JQuery to try to make things easier to create, and remain consistent among browsers. Browser compatibility is an issue, but Dart aims to include a lot of this functionality in the language itself.
How Dart Works
Dart is designed to be run as a virtual machine (just like Java), so t it can be run on the server side too. It's also designed as a real language - it has lots of constructs and features useful for making big apps, which don't exist in the same way in JavaScript.
Dart is similar to things such as Java and C, and even JavaScript It wouldn't take a competent JavaScript programmer that long to grasp the basics of Dart. it's designed with web apps in mind. It tackles problems such as start-up time, garbage collection and threading. It's worth learning an extra bit of syntax to cut hours off development time.
Barriers of Darts Applications
The developer community have been using JavaScript for years and years, have built businesses around it, developed tools for it and know how it works. They see the introduction of a new tool as some sort of threat. So, a lot of developers are the opposite of overjoyed.
Developers of web browsers see it as a threat. Remember that Google has taken a large share of the browser market already with Chrome. If it was also to control the development of the language that everybody uses to write web apps, you can see how people might begin to think the whole thing was a bit of a stitch-up.
Mozilla has already suggested it will not be considering embedding Dart support into future versions of Firefox. Then again, Brendan Eich does work for Mozilla (and he invented JavaScript).
The majority of developers don't want it, and the majority of browsers don't want to support it
How To Overcome ?
We respectfully submit that when it comes to web technologies, developers are not the most important people - users are. Consider a world in which you can run your applications as usual, really fast, or with extra features. Which option are you going to choose?
It isn't too hard to see a future where Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Maps and Google everything else run better or more enhanced in Chrome. , people will want to run them in Chrome. And if they see some sort of competitive advantage, other people will want their applications to run in Dart.
With the Chrome OS and the Chrome app store, Google has plenty of opportunities to deliver faster, better apps. At least, that seems to be the plan.
Microsoft - ActiveX and Internet Explorer is similar ?
Well, yes, it's a little similar. Google is being a bit more open about the technology. It's created under the revised BSD license, so the code itself is about as open as you can get.
But nobody is suggesting that people will somehow be compelled to use Dart. The thing that's often overlooked is that a lot of the world's web application developers actually work for Google. If they want to create a new tool that's better for them to use and, as a by-product, release it to the rest of the world for free, should we really be complaining?
Why would someone build a web app that wouldn't run in the majority of browsers?
Future of Darts
It would be a little bit of a gamble to stake your livelihood on Dart. But as mentioned previously, even if used only by Google themselves, Dart would still have a huge impact on the web, and presumably for Google themselves, whose server bills must be quite terrifying. Small efficiency savings for Google could add up to more than a banker's bonus!
If you want to check out the current code to the Dart language, (http://code.google.com/p/dart). The language itself, including some already useful documentation and some development tools is on the main site at dartlang.org.
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