AngularDart roadmap update

Recently, the Dart language team published an important announcement about the AngularDart roadmap update. We decided to translate this news into Russian and add our comment about what this message will mean for the Dart community.

Today we are announcing significant update of AngularDart packages… This release is the result of thousands of developer hours and brings a number of improvements to our users. It will improve performance for large applications, simplify common use cases, and remove some rough edges. If you are already using AngularDart, we recommend updating it.

We also want to take advantage of this release to indicate a change in priorities in our project. This should not be news to many of you, as we have been discussing this over the past few months on the GitHub repository

The adoption of AngularDart inside Google has been fast, but the external web infrastructure is very competitive, and we are seeing a modest rise in the popularity of the framework among teams outside of Google. In this regard, we reoriented ourselves to Google projects: a new Google Play Console and Google Ads… We want to honestly warn about this because we try to be transparent about our investment priorities for development in the coming years.

One of the main reasons for our decision to focus AngularDart on Google apps is the rapid development of Flutter. Over two million developers have already used it to create beautiful, fast, native apps for mobile, desktop, and now for the web. The developers are asking for further development, and we intend to do this.

To avoid misunderstandings: we continue to develop AngularDart. But turning a successful internal project into a successful external project is a big step. An open source product means more than just submitting code to the GitHub repository and publishing packages. For a successful experience, users need examples and documentation. They are waiting for answers to their questions, bug fixes and feature development. And we hope for more involvement of the user community in these areas.

This release introduces a new infrastructure toolkit. We hope we can use it to update source repositories and publish packages more frequently. At the same time, our resources to support large open source projects are limited, and we would like to focus on the growth and development of the Flutter ecosystem.
Thus, our twelve month roadmap is to:

  1. Post a long term stable release of the main AngularDart packages as soon as possible to pub.dev… They will support the latest stable Dart SDK and have updated dependencies.
  2. Continue updating source repository latest internal changes. For the most part now, they are about providing null-safety in the code base.
  3. Focus on upgrading packages to the new null-safety feature.

If you are already working with AngularDart please be aware that we will continue to support you with updates. But if you are just starting a new web project on Dart, we highly recommend looking aside Flutter, which is our long-term cross-platform development proposal.

For more information on our progress as planned, see source repository and package page

Note: This declaration only applies to AngularDart. Angular Javascript Framework is a completely separate project.

Comment from the development team Wrike:

Many have heard that our system (Wrike) is one of the largest projects in the world, written in Dart and AngularDart. Therefore, the attitude towards this update is ambiguous. It may sound strange, but despite everything, it can be called positive. Firstly, we haven’t heard about AngularDart for a long time, and although we have direct communication channels with Google, we were waiting for it no less than others. To summarize the message, this is what it means for the Dart community.

Transparency has been added to the AngularDart roadmap. The biggest problem with the web world is that it is very competitive. Not even that, VERY competitive. Therefore, it can be very expensive to seriously bring a framework to a market where there are already such giants as React, Vue or its big brother Angular (TS). And up to this moment there was some kind of understatement: “What will happen next?” Will AngularDart try to conquer the world, will it remain a niche history and in general what is the plan? Often newbies, coming to the world of Dart, asked the question: “I want a web application, what should I use?” Now the answer is: Google is betting on Flutter. Given its popularity (105k stars on GitHub!), This is a smart move. The amount of work done to add documentation, fix bugs and code quality is so great that AngularDart is very difficult to bring to that level. However, AngularDart remains open, and the community can make fixes and improvements to the framework.

Does this mean that you need to run somewhere, rewrite everything on a new track? No, because AngularDart support will remain, and knowing how much has already been written (adsence, for example), most likely, support will remain with us for a long time. Those users who have AngularDart running right now don’t have to worry about their production turning into a pumpkin.

And the best part: Flutter for Web attracts additional attention and resources. Judge for yourself: the mobile device market, if not captured, is quite tense because of Flutter. The desktop development market is generally stagnant – everyone uses browsers (Electron, PWA). There is no market for IoT device interfaces at all. Everything goes to the fact that Flutter, gaining strength and speed to enter the world of the Web, will do it soon. What will come of this is difficult to guess, but we hope that he will succeed.

As an advertisement: For the fourth year in a row, we are hosting DartUP, an annual conference dedicated to Dart / Flutter and AngularDart. This time the conference will be held online. Unfortunately, the famous craft dart beer will not be available this year. But there will be everything else: free, cool speakers, informal communication and informal formats (yes, that’s it). Follow the news on dartup.ru and in telegram community.

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