Adjust our investment in Dart’s open source network framework

Original address: medium.com/dartlang/an…

Timsneath.medium.com/

Published: May 13, 2021-3 minutes to read

Two months ago, we delivered the first web-enabled stable version of Flutter. This is an important milestone in the overall client development, combining Flutter’s mature UI framework, Dart’s industrial-strength JavaScript toolchain, and the underlying power of the web platform to provide consistency between mobile devices and browsers.

Since this release, we have been pleased to see developers start using Flutter on the web. Even at this early stage, over 10% of Flutter build commands are network specific, indicating that web applications are already deployed using Flutter. Inside Google, many teams have come to rely on Flutter’s online support. We ourselves have used it extensively in Flutter development, including DartPad and DevTools, our suite of performance and debugging tools.

When we first started adding network support to Flutter a few years ago, we hoped it would bring good results, but it still felt like a moon. While much work remains to be done, we believe that Flutter’s network support has the potential to fill an important gap with a high-quality solution. As a result, we are adjusting our investment in Dart’s open source networking tools to focus on Flutter.

In changing our focus, we are also scaling back the external work of AngularDart, a standalone web framework that grew out of the original Angular project. Six months ago, we announced AngularDart’s roadmap, including the release of a long-term stable update (AngularDart 6) and support for NULL Safety, but prioritizing AngularDart engineering work on major internal customers, This includes Google Ads and Google Play Console. While the AngularDart framework itself is relatively easy to open source, Google’s build and release system is uniquely specialized, leading to significant divergence and making it difficult to synchronize internal and external releases.

Focusing on the majority of AngularDart users helps us make the most of our excellent engineering resources and we want everyone to benefit as a result. For projects like Ads and the Play Console, we can address their needs more directly without worrying about external influences; For external users, we can put all our efforts into giving you a high quality Flutter product that can be used in web, desktop, mobile and embedded scenarios.

We can put all our efforts into giving you a quality Flutter product that can run in web, desktop, mobile and embedded scenarios.

Over the past few months, we’ve been talking to AngularDart’s biggest external users to help them develop their own road maps. For some, Flutter’s online support is a perfect choice; Others are satisfied with AngularDart’s current stability and maturity; Others are taking advantage of the opportunity to transition to Angular, Google’s popular typescript-based web framework.

Angular itself continues to grow rapidly. Weekly downloads have grown by more than 60% in the past year, and nearly 2 million GitHub public repositories depend on it. AngularDart’s syntax will be familiar to anyone using it today, and it’s a reasonable choice for developers looking for a modern web framework.

We think Flutter’s network support will be an exciting option for developers who want to use Dart. As an early example, PropOps– a tech startup in real estate — has had great success building line-of-business applications with Flutter, as shown in the screenshot below.

PropOps: A cloud-based property management tool built with Flutter’s network support.

In the coming weeks, we will be offering a stable external version of AngularDart with zero security; At that point, it will go into maintenance mode. If there is a committed consortium or community group that would like to take over the leadership of the project and continue to develop it, we would be interested to hear from them.

We are pushing forward with web support for Flutter and Angular itself: stay tuned for more at Google I/O next week.

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