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Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Haven't seen many Dart projects so far.

I've also created a lightweight Express-inspired framework at: https://github.com/Dartist/Express

Since Dart lacks the ability to extend built-in types using something like extension methods, categories or refinements as seen in other languages I think exposing a user-controlled class is the way to go as it lets you expose a framework-focused, value-added, user-facing DRY API.

I went a much similar route with my lightweight express-inspried framework.

I made user-controlled classes that get populated with relevant data and middleware information. Like stuff from form parsing.

https://github.com/Daegalus/fukiya

Well, Start uses another project called Hart [1] template engine that has syntax similar to Slim or Jade. And I'm going to include Gloss [2] there too, it's a CSS preprocessor, but it's not stable yet.

[1] http://github.com/lvivski/hart [2] http://github.com/lvivski/gloss

[disclaimer, I work on the Dart project]

You might be interested in checking out http://pub.dartlang.org which is our repository of Dart packages. Meanwhile, we're still in beta, so I hope to see more projects when we hit 1.0.

I have to confess that after read through the Dart specs, all I could think was "meh". Google had a chance to throw their weight behind some powerful language advancements, but all I saw was a boring Java/Javascript hybrid. And given that Dart will never be natively embedded in Safari or IE, it's going to be very hard to get traction on it.

I suspect that's why you haven't seen many projects in Dart.

Dart is supposed to be "boring". Their intention was to create a language which is familiar to anyone who used Java, C#, AS3, JavaScript, or any other C-like language in the past.

From my own experience, I'd say that this strategy worked exactly as intended. I was able to write code after skimming through some of the examples. To be honest, I only bothered with Dart because it used C-like syntax.

Also, it compiles to surprisingly fast JavaScript [1]. Support by all browser vendors isn't necessary. You can use it either way. The lack of support really doesn't change anything. You'd use a build/deploy script either way, wouldn't you?

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/114943499066504644906/posts/WXNL...

Agreed, the language syntax itself is very boring. Listening to talks from their language designers, I think they are even annoyed a little that they can't do more interesting things with the syntax. I've been following dart for a while now, and here's the feel I get from the language:

* Dart's goal is not to explore exciting new syntax, it's about giving developers a language that can quickly start being productive on.

* Cleaning up a lot of the messy syntax that exist in Javascript today.

* Be able to easily and efficiently compile to Javascript. This seems to be the reason for a lot of the language syntax decisions.

* Provide a full development experience (language, tools, ui, etc...) out of the box.

A very important feature is class-based object orientation, which the vast majority of developers are familiar with, thus it is more natural to use compared to prototype-based OO.

Also, tool-visible types allow for better/easier tool-assisted development, something that has been a stumbling block even in the most monstrous of IDEs. For example, ever ctrl-clicked a function assigned to a var in Eclipse?

yup. No prototype inheritance is huge, plus having a single entry point for an app is huge. These 2 provide a lot of VM optimization opportunities.

Dart syntax is familiar and it's a plus, you don't have to learn new syntax quirks.

Another interesting one is https://github.com/dart-lang/web-ui

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