Table Of ContentLearning Dart
Learn how to program applications with Dart 1.0,
a language specifically designed to produce
better-structured, high-performance applications
Ivo Balbaert
Dzenan Ridjanovic
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learning Dart
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First published: December 2013
Production Reference: 1191213
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-84969-742-2
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Cover Image by Javier Barría C ([email protected])
Credits
Authors Copy Editors
Ivo Balbaert Roshni Banerjee
Dzenan Ridjanovic Brandt D'Mello
Tanvi Gaitonde
Reviewers Shambhavi Pai
Sergey Akopkokhyants
Lavina Pereira
Tom Alexander
Adithi Shetty
Christophe Herreman
Laxmi Subramanian
Yehor Lvivski
Christopher McGuire
Project Coordinators
Apeksha Chitnis
Acquisition Editors Wendell Palmer
Saleem Ahmed
Rebecca Youe
Proofreader
Clyde Jenkins
Lead Technical Editor
Neeshma Ramakrishnan
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Technical Editors
Venu Manthena
Graphics
Amit Singh Ronak Dhruv
Hardik B. Soni Disha Haria
Gaurav Thingalaya
Production Coordinator
Pooja Chiplunkar
Cover Work
Pooja Chiplunkar
About the Authors
Ivo Balbaert is currently a lecturer for (Web) Programming and Databases at CVO
Antwerpen (www.cvoantwerpen.be), a community college in Belgium. He received
a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20
years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies,
and for 10 years as a project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From
2000 onward, he switched to partly teaching and partly developing software
(KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerp). He also wrote an introductory book in Dutch
about developing in Ruby and Rails: Programmeren met Ruby en Rails, Van Duuren
Media, ISBN: 978-90-5940-365-9, 2009, 420 p. In 2012, he authored a book on the Go
programming language: The Way To Go, IUniverse, ISBN: 978-1-4697-6917-2, 600 p.
Dzenan Ridjanovic is a university professor who is planning his early
retirement to focus on the development of web applications with Dart, HTML5,
web components, and NoSQL databases. For more than 10 years, he was a
Director of Research and Development in the Silverrun team (http://www.
silverrun.com/), which created several commercial tools for analysis, design,
and development of data-driven applications. He was a principal developer of
Modelibra (http://www.modelibra.org/) tools and frameworks for model-driven
development in Java. Recently, he has been developing the Dartling framework for
design and code generation of Dart models. His projects are at GitHub (https://
github.com/dzenanr), where he is considered a Dart expert (http://osrc.dfm.
io/dzenanr). He writes about his projects at On Dart blog (http://dzenanr.
github.io/). His courses are available at On Dart Education (http://ondart.
me/). He markets his Dart efforts at On Dart G+ Page (https://plus.google.
com/+OndartMe). Dzenan Ridjanovic wrote a book in 2009, under the Creative
Commons License, entitled Spiral Development of Dynamic Web Applications: Using
Modelibra and Wicket (http://www.modelibra.org/).
I want to thank my spouse Amra for her constant care and support,
the Dart team for creating a missing web language, and Ivo Balbaert
for his productive writing.
About the Reviewers
Sergey Akopkokhyants is a Java certified technical architect with more than 19
years of experience in designing and developing client and server-side applications.
For the last five years, Sergey has been responsible for customizing and producing
web-oriented applications for wholesale business management solutions projects for
several worldwide mobile communications companies. Sergey is passionate about
web designing and development, and believes that an investment in bleeding edge
technologies will always give a return to both the individual and the organization.
He is also the author and owner of several open source projects on GitHub, including
the Dart Web Toolkit (DWT). Sergey likes sharing knowledge and experience with
others, and helping them to increase their skills and productivity.
Tom Alexander graduated with a Computer Science degree from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute. He currently works for TripAdvisor as a software engineer,
where he works on the mobile version of the website.
Christophe Herreman is a versatile and passionate software architect with more
than 10 years of professional experience. He is also a Certified Scrum Master and has
general knowledge of many tools and platforms. For the last few years, Christophe
has mainly worked on web-based applications in a variety of domains, such as
healthcare, education, traffic control, and electronics. His main tasks have been:
architecture and development of the client software using Flex, ActionScript and
Adobe AIR, HTML, JavaScript, and client-server integrations with Java, .NET, and
PHP; automating the build process with tools such as Maven, Ant, Batch, Jenkins/
Hudson; setting up unit, integration and functional tests; reviewing, auditing,
and improving existing codebases; coaching and mentoring teams. Christophe is
also a regular speaker at conferences and user groups, as well as an active open
source contributor. He's the founder of the Spring ActionScript framework and the
AS3Commons project and a committer on the Apache Flex project. In the past, he
has lectured on software and web development at the University College of West-
Flanders, Belgium. Together with his partner, he runs the Belgium-based software
consultancy firm Stack & Heap (www.stackandheap.com).
Yehor Lvivski thinks that it's never too late to learn and always tries to know
the current trends of the web and predict the future ones. He has always wanted
to be a designer, but later found an area where he can combine both his design and
engineering skills. For the last six years, Yehor was involved in game development,
added a nice interactive UI for a search engine, created his own CSS animations
library, and several open source projects. He really likes to create a great visual
experience. Yehor now works for SpatialKey, and is involved in changing the future
of data analysis. Not only does he like to create things, but he's also an active speaker
at different local and global conferences. He believes that knowledge sharing is the
key point to evolution.
Christopher McGuire is an application developer currently working in Glasgow,
Scotland. He graduated from the University of Strathclyde in 2011 with a B.Sc (Hons)
in Computer Science and currently works for an investment bank. Chris
has experience in developing Enterprise Standard Server applications, primarily
using Java and other object oriented-languages, while also developing web/mobile
front-end applications using native Android/iOS and HTML5. From this, he has
multiple applications published on the Google Play market. In addition to this,
Chris has developed multiple web applications and has a strong interest in new and
emerging technologies, which have led him to become part of the Dart community
and develop several more applications using this language.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Dart – A Modern Web Programming Language 9
What is Dart? 9
Dart is a perfect fit for HTML5 10
A very short history of web programming 11
Dart empowers the web client 11
JavaScript is not the way to go for complex apps 12
Google, GWT, and Dart 13
Advantages of Dart 13
Getting started with Dart 14
Installing the Dart Editor 15
Your first Dart program 16
Getting a view on the Dart tool chain 18
The Dart execution model 18
A bird's eye view on Dart 20
Example 1 – raising rabbits 20
Extracting a function 22
A web version 24
Example 2 – banking 27
Making a todo list with Dart 28
Summary 29
