I'm planning to create a cross platform desktop application with Dart. Because there's no ready built frameworks supporting Dart yet, i have to compile Dart to Javascript first. I cannot develop completly in Dartium since the desktop frameworks built around HTML5 provide some custom Javascript API's (file system access, native library support, etc.) which i'm planning to use.
I've found the following frameworks which might suit my needs but i'm looking for best practices when developing with Dart.
Maybe there are some other options i haven't seen yet. I've excluded projects like AppJs (dead), and Cappucino (OSX only).
One option is the Electron framework. Originally created by GitHub for their Atom editor, it allows you to build cross-platform applications for Linux, OS X, or Windows, using web technologies. There is an available Dart wrapper as well. However, this wrapper lacks complete support for the API, and doesn't appear to be under active development.
Another method of using Electron is to call all the electron and node methods via dart:js
interop. I've had more success with this method than the library.
Electron uses a main process, stored in main.js
, to run the app, and create new BrowserWindow
s, which load your html. I've found it easier to simply write this file in Javascript, as wrapping too many JS methods is a pain, and this script is relatively light. However, you can use a main.dart
file and simply build it with dart2js. Electron will be happy as long as it can find a main.js
file.
You can essentially build pages for the app just as you would a regular webpage. You can write it in dart, debug in Dartium, and compile to Javascript for testing it in your app. Of course, your code can't access node APIs from the browser, so you'll have to build the app every time you want to use these. (If anyone has a better way, please point it out!)
One final caveat: Dart's IO libraries won't work with Electron. This is a bit of a drawback, as accessing files is important for pretty much any application. Your best bet will be to use node's filesystem library through dart-js interop. At times, this may feel like a bit of a hack (for example, when working with callbacks), but it gets the job done.
There is the first option.
You can write Chrome Packaged App with Dart.
dart2js makes it possible to compile dart code to javascript.
and thanks to chrome.dart package, chrome APIs are availble.
Spark is nice example. See https://github.com/dart-lang/spark
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