DART language

Asynchronous programming is everywhere – user interaction, network access, file I/O. Dart simplifies and enhances these scenarios with the 1.9 release. Today’s release introduces async methods and await expressions built on top of our existing ... [More] Future API. You can now use familiar control flow features – for/while loops, if blocks, and try/catch – to manage complex asynchronous interactions. These new features are explained thoroughly the Dart Language Asynchrony Support: Phase 1 article. Before [Less]

Last time the Dungeon was rendered using a PRE tag - this time we will us an HTML5 canvas and use PNG files to render a better looking display. In 2014 I entered a game jam and from that I have a set of RPG graphics that will be used for this demo. ... [More] The jam's theme was 8-bit so all the gfx tiles are 8 pixels by 8 pixels. There are few changes since last time... The code has been tidied up and rearranged. The new version can be found under the parttwo folder. PGMap - has a new... [Less]

Procedural generation is a technique used in computer graphics, simulations and games to create content on demand. For example, the worlds in Minecraft are not installed with the game, they are created by algorithms whilst the game is being played. ... [More] Often the algorithms introduce variations to allow unique content to be created every time the game is played. Fractals are an example of procedural generation as are many on the HTML5 demos on this blog. This is the first in a series looking at Procedural Generation using Dart. The example will be generating a 2D dungeon as might be found... [Less]

Support for enums, async, and deferred loading are now officially part of the 2nd revision of the Ecma-408 standard, the Dart Programming Language Specification. The second revision was approved last week at the Ecma General Assembly.You can find ... [More] more information about using the new features in our language tour on dartlang.org:Enumerations (enum) Asynchrony (async, await, and more)Deferred loading ( [Less]

There's a steadily growing number of Dart books. Is 'Mastering Dart?' by Sergey Akopkokhyants worthy of a place on your bookshelf? Find out in this review! The book consists of twelve chapters over three hundred and thirty pages, covering a broad ... [More] range of topics in detail. Topics covered include Async, Reflection, Isolates and Javascript Interoperation. This title goes well beyond the introductory level, even discussing the inner workings of the Dart VM. It doesn't attempt to cover everything comprehensively -... [Less]

Tonight, I place a Polymer.dart project under continuous integration. I have done similar work with some of the tests in the Patterns in Polymer book, but that is running on a custom install Jenkins server. This time, I am going to install on a ... [More] standard CI service—Drone.io.Last night I got a command-line build script ready for the AFormInput class/mixin. I hope that getting that test running on the service will be similar to "regular" Dart projects, but there is only one way to be sure. The only difference between these tests and... [Less]

I need to improve my continuous integration solutions for Patterns in Polymer. I do not know that I necessarily need to include a chapter on it in the book, but I ought to at least be able to point to some solutions in my research notes. Especially ... [More] since I have been asked about it multiple times this week alone.With that in mind, I first need to test my AFormInputMixin class from last night, which serves as mixin or baseclass for other Polymer.dart elements so that they can behave like native HTML form input elements.... [Less]

Munching Squares is a graphical that goes back to the PDP-1The code (available on GitHub) is very simple and easy to experiment with: for (int x = 0; x < 256; x ) { for (int y = 0; y < 256; y ) { ch = (x ^ y) % 256; c2d..fillStyle = "rgb(0 ... [More] , 0, $ch)" ..fillRect(x, y, w, w) ..fillStyle = "rgb($ch, 0, 0)" ..fillRect(256 x, y, w, w) ..fillStyle = "rgb(0, $ch, 0)" ..fillRect(x,... [Less]

As pointed out in comments last night, there may be yet another minimum viable Polymer.dart mixin than what I identified.The example mixin that I have been using is <a-form-input>, which enables arbitrary Polymer elements to serve as ... [More] <input> elements in native HTML forms. Yesterday's solution was for the mixin to define form-like instance variables (e.g. name and value), but not mark them as published properties:abstract class AFormInputMixin { // @PublishedProperty(reflect: true) String name; // @PublishedProperty(reflect: true) String value; void attached() { // Use name and... [Less]

I may have given up prematurely on Dart mixins with Polymer.dart code. I still do not believe that it will work well enough that I would use mixins often, but maybe in certain specialized cases. If nothing else, I am curious to find the minimum ... [More] viable Polymer mixin that can work.As suggested in the comments from last night's post, I start by commenting out the @PublishedProperty Polymer annotations from my mixin class:library a_form_input;abstract class AFormInputMixin { // @PublishedProperty(reflect: true) String name; // @PublishedProperty(reflect: true) String... [Less]