Dart Cookbook

346 Pages·2014·3.354 MB·English

by  Ivo Balbaert

Dart Cookbook
Over 110 incredibly effective, useful, and hands-on recipes
to design Dart web client and server applications
Ivo Balbaert
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Dart Cookbook
Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing
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First published: October 2014
Production reference: 1171014
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78398-962-1
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Ivo Balbaert Kinjal Bari
Reviewers Proofreaders
Sergey Akopkokhyants Simran Bhogal
Claudio d'Angelis Maria Gould
Joris Hermans Ameesha Green
Acquisition Editor Indexer
Sam Wood Monica Ajmera Mehta
Content Development Editor Production Coordinator
Azharuddin Sheikh Alwin Roy
Technical Editor Cover Work
Anand Singh Alwin Roy
Copy Editors
Sarang Chari
Adithi Shetty
About the Author
Ivo Balbaert is currently a lecturer in (Web) Programming and Databases at CVO Antwerpen
(www.cvoantwerpen.be), a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in Applied
Physics from the University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software
industry as a developer and consultant for several companies, and for 10 years as a project
manager at the Antwerp University Hospital. In 2000, he switched to partly teaching and partly
developing software (KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerp).
Ivo also wrote an introductory book in Dutch about developing in Ruby and Rails called
Programmeren met Ruby en Rails, Van Duuren Media, 2009. In 2012, he authored a book on
the Go programming language called The Way To Go, iUniverse. Last year, in collaboration with
Dzenan Ridzanovic, he also wrote Learning Dart, Packt Publishing.
I would like to thank my wife, Christiane, for her support and patience during
the development of this book.
About the Reviewers
Sergey Akopkokhyants is a software architect with more than 20 years of professional
experience in designing and developing client- and server-side applications. He is also a
certified Java developer and project manager. He has general knowledge of many tools,
languages, and platforms. For the last 5 years, he has been responsible for customizing and
producing web-oriented applications for wholesale business management solutions projects;
he has been doing this for several worldwide mobile communication companies. Sergey's
responsibilities include architecture design and guidance of client software development
using Flex, ActionScript, HTML, JavaScript, and client-server integration with Java. He is also
the founder of and an active contributor to several open source projects on GitHub, including
the Dart Web Toolkit (DWT) and Angular Dart UI. He is passionate about web design and
development and likes sharing his expertise with others, helping them to increase their skills
and productivity. Also, he was one of the reviewers of Learning Dart, Packt Publishing.
Claudio d'Angelis is an Italian programmer with 10 years of experience in document
digitization, web development, and Linux administration. As an early adopter of Dart,
he continues to contribute to the community. His contributions include writing articles,
open source projects, speaking at conferences, and presenting episodes on Google
Developers Live.
Joris Hermans is a web developer enthusiast who works for Truvo, an online directory
company. He is also the proud owner of lots of Dart packages, a real-time dart framework
named force, a search engine named Bounty Hunter, a persistent abstraction layer named
cargo, a dependency injection for Dart called wired, and so on. He also likes to speak about
the Web and Dart, so it is possible that you will meet him at a conference.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Working with Dart Tools 7
Introduction 7
Configuring the Dart environment 8
Setting up the checked and production modes 9
Rapid Dart Editor troubleshooting 12
Hosting your own private pub mirror 14
Using Sublime Text 2 as an IDE 15
Compiling your app to JavaScript 17
Debugging your app in JavaScript for Chrome 19
Using the command-line tools 21
Solving problems when pub get fails 23
Shrinking the size of your app 24
Making a system call 25
Using snapshotting 26
Getting information from the operating system 27
Chapter 2: Structuring, Testing, and Deploying an Application 31
Introduction 32
Exiting from an app 32
Parsing command-line arguments 33
Structuring an application 35
Using a library from within your app 38
Microtesting your code with assert 40
Unit testing a Polymer web app 41
Adding logging to your app 44
Documenting your app 47
Profiling and benchmarking your app 49
Table of Contents
Publishing and deploying your app 51
Using different settings in the checked and production modes 52
Chapter 3: Working with Data Types 55
Introduction 56
Concatenating strings 56
Using regular expressions 57
Strings and Unicode 59
Using complex numbers 60
Creating an enum 64
Flattening a list 67
Generating a random number within a range 68
Getting a random element from a list 69
Working with dates and times 70
Improving performance in numerical computations 73
Using SIMD for enhanced performance 76
Chapter 4: Object Orientation 81
Introduction 81
Testing and converting types 82
Comparing two objects 84
Using a factory constructor 86
Building a singleton 90
Using reflection 91
Using mixins 95
Using annotations 97
Using the call method 99
Using noSuchMethod 100
Making toJSON and fromJSON methods in your class 103
Creating common classes for client and server apps 106
Chapter 5: Handling Web Applications 109
Introduction 110
Responsive design 110
Sanitizing HTML 111
Using a browser's local storage 113
Using application cache to work offline 116
Preventing an onSubmit event from reloading the page 119
Dynamically inserting rows in an HTML table 120
Using CORS headers 124
Using keyboard events 125
Enabling drag-and-drop 127
ii
Table of Contents
Enabling touch events 132
Creating a Chrome app 135
Structuring a game project 140
Using WebGL in your app 142
Authorizing OAuth2 to Google services 146
Talking with JavaScript 150
Using JavaScript libraries 154
Chapter 6: Working with Files and Streams 157
Introduction 157
Reading and processing a file line by line 158
Writing to a file 162
Searching in a file 163
Concatenating files 166
Downloading a file 169
Working with blobs 172
Transforming streams 174
Chapter 7: Working with Web Servers 179
Introduction 179
Creating a web server 180
Posting JSON-formatted data 183
Receiving data on the web server 186
Serving files with http_server 191
Using sockets 193
Using WebSockets 196
Using secure sockets and servers 202
Using a JSON web service 205
Chapter 8: Working with Futures, Tasks, and Isolates 209
Introduction 209
Writing a game loop 210
Error handling with Futures 212
Scheduling tasks using Futures 217
Running a recurring function 219
Using isolates in the Dart VM 222
Using isolates in web apps 228
Using multiple cores with isolates 231
Using the Worker Task framework 233
Chapter 9: Working with Databases 237
Introduction 237
Storing data locally with IndexedDB 238
iii