concept Dart Editor in category dart

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Dart in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

Although you can use any text editor to write Dart code, you’ll get the best experience when you use the Dart Editor. The Dart Editor is built using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), a framework for building customized code editors. In the Dart Editor, you get the usual features such as code completion, navigation, and code outlining, along with static analysis such as warnings and errors. The static-analysis tool is also available as a standalone command-line tool that you can use in your continuous-build system to provide early indication of errors in the code. Figure 1.7 shows a typical view of some of the features in the Dart Editor.

Figure 1.7. The Dart Editor, showing a simple browser application and the code-completion window

Using the Dart Editor, you can write code; and if that code is associated with an HTML page, you can convert the code into JavaScript and open it in a browser of your choice by using the dart2js tool. In the Dartium browser, which is Chrome with the Dart VM embedded, you can skip the conversion to JavaScript and execute the code directly in the browser. Dartium also communicates back to the Dart Editor to allow round-trip, step-by-step debugging.

2.2. “Hello World” with the Dart Editor

The Dart Editor has a growing number of essential tools to help you develop and debug Dart code. Some of these are code navigation, code autocomplete, refactoring, and information about errors and warnings. Although Dart—like many dynamic, interpreted languages—can be written in just about any text editor, the Dart development team has put significant effort into providing a fully featured developer experience that is often missing from other JavaScript alternatives.

You’ll start by using the Dart Editor to run the same HelloWorld.dart script in the server-side Dart VM, this time launched from the Dart Editor. Then you’ll modify the script to enable it to be hosted in an HTML page and run in the browser-based Dart VM, which is built into the Dartium web browser that comes bundled with the Dart Editor.

Figure 2.2 shows the Dart Editor that you’ll be working with throughout the rest of the book.

Figure 2.2. The Dart Editor is a lightweight version of the Eclipse tool.