It's been a while, but I'm back with some cool news from Google I/O 2012. This annual conference of developers highlights new developments in the tech world from Google. There were many new technologies on display at this year's convention, and I was particularly interested in the new web programming language Dart.
This is a web programming language, presented by the lead programmers Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, and offered as a replacement to Javascript. There are several issues with Javascript, according to the video, including difficult syntax, error forgiveness, and difficulty creating web apps for optimal performance.
Dart is designed to specifically fix these issues. The syntax was designed to be easy for a C#/Java programmer to pick up, and the error-checking is very strict, enforcing higher coding standards and more functional web apps. They also showed the ability to convert Dart to Javascript, so that this new language doesn't "break the web".
A portion of the video spent on performance enhancements Dart brings. This part of the video, while mostly over my head, will be the most impactful to the web as we know it. One feature that did interest me was the idea of "tree-shaking", where Dart drops any unused functions and variables not used at compile time, making programs smaller and run faster. The presenters were concerned with trying to drop 1 second load times to 10 milliseconds, and the implications for web apps here are amazing. This gives developers the opportunity to create larger, more intensive web apps with less lead time, giving us more options to visit websites, rather than downloading or installing local software.
Every bit of Dart appears to be free and open source, which begs the question "Why launch this cool stuff and not charge for it?". From what I could tell, Google is trying to follow in Sun's footsteps with Java. While Java is free for the casual user, the language itself drives companies to do business with Sun. While the article referenced is a little dated, I can certainly see the sense in Google trying to capture more users of its services, given their advertising-driven business model.
Based on what the developers presented, lots of time and energy went into creating this language, and has a place among today's technologies. While this isn't a complete picture, it looks compelling from their presentation. If it works as well as claimed, business could even see benefits from using this language to develop sites that load very quickly and are easy to maintain based on the readability of the code.
Overall, the presenters did a good job of selling Dart. That said, we'll have to wait and see if Google can adequately differentiate its product from the myriad of other web programming languages already available.
No comments:
Post a Comment