Dart projects of Energy2D and Quantum Workbench announced

Update: I have decided to suspend these Dart projects due to the uncertainty of the future of the language following Google's decision to not bundle the Dart VM into Chrome. At this point, I have to fall back to JavaScript.

Last month, Google announced Dart 1.0, a new programming language for the Web that aims to greatly accelerate Web development. Dart uses HTML5 as the UI. It can either run on the Dart Virtual Machine being built in Chrome or be compiled into JavaScript to run in other browsers. Dart can also be used to create standalone apps (I guess it is meant to be the main programming language for Google's own Chrome OS) or server-side software. An ECMA Technical Committee (TC 52) has been formed to make Dart into an international standard.

This is the moment I have been waiting for. As a developer with C/Java background, I am not convinced that JavaScript is made for large, complex projects (as Web programming seems to be moving towards) -- even after reading many articles and books about JavaScript. The facts that after ten years Google Docs still has only a tiny fraction of functionality of Word and basic functions such as positioning an image have not improved much suggest that its JavaScript front end has probably reached its limit.

Don't get me wrong. JavaScript is an excellent choice for creating interactive Web experiences. I use JavaScript extensively to create Web interfaces for interacting with the Energy2D applet. But I think it is in general healthy for the developer community if we are given more options. Recognizing the weaknesses of JavaScript, the community has already created CoffeeScript and TypeScript (supersets of JavaScript that strips off unproductive features of JavaScript) that also require compilation into native JavaScript. Dart is Google's solution to these problems that should be welcomed. To a Java developer like me, Dart provides a much better option because it returns the power of class-based object-oriented programming to developers who must create Web-based front ends. What is even sweeter is that its SDK provides a familiar Eclipse-based programming platform that makes many developers feel at home.

Excited about the potential of this new language (plus it is from Google and will be highly performant on Chrome), I am announcing the development of the Dart versions of our Energy2D and Quantum Workbench software. These software are based on complex mathematical solutions of extremely complex partial differential equations and will hopefully provide some showcases to anyone interested in Dart. This is not to say the development of the Java versions will cease. We are committed to develop and maintain both Dart and Java versions.

Hopefully 2014 will be an exciting year for us!