Building for the Material web with Polymer and Dart

Who am I?๏ Founder @ Dynamatik

๏ Co-Founder @ Ember Chat

๏ Engineer @ Kobo

๏ @FaisalAbid

๏ faisal.abid@gmail.com - Ask me anything about Node, AngularJS, Dart, Polymer, and Android.

About the talk๏ Split into three parts.

๏ Goal is to inspire you to go out, learn Dart & Polymer and rule the world.

๏ Part 1. Quick Dart introduction to basic language concepts

๏ Part 2. Quick rundown of Web components & Polymer

๏ Part 3. Dart + Polymer and what Material design is

But first Let’s play a game

Guess the language

public String Hello(){return "World";

}

public String Hello(){return "World";

}

Java

function Hello(){return "World";

}

function Hello(){return "World";

}

Javascript

String Hello(){return "World";

}

String Hello(){return "World";

}

Dart!

You already know Dart**95% of it at least

1Dart

What is Dart & Why should I care?๏ Dart is a new platform and language by Google.

๏ Dart is for “Scalable web app engineering”

“Scalable web app engineering” What does that mean?

Scalable web app engineering๏ Javascript is “Scalable” to an extent

• RequireJS/AMD modules

• Frameworks like Backbone, Ember.js, Angular.js

• JQuery, Zepto

Javascript is the root of all evil*

*a little bit dramatic, but gets the point across

Scalable web app engineering๏ Dart is built for scale

• Optional type checking - I <3 typed objects

• Single threaded “Isolate” concept for server apps. Web workers for client.

• Objects, Classes, Polymorphism

• Easy async, less messy callbacks

• Many years of programming language research

• High performance VM, Dartium

• Compile straight to JS for cross browser compatibility

All while keeping the language easy to develop in.

All while keeping the language easy to develop in.

Because all that scale stuff is cool, but this is what really matters.

class Conference { String name; num attendees; Conference(String name, num attendees) { this.name = name;

this.attendees = attendees; } }// then latervar webunleashed = new Conference("WebUnleashed", 5800);

Example Class in Dart

Dart IDE Tour

Dart IDE Tour

Dart Package Manager

Dart IDE Tour

Dart IDE Tour

Optionally Typed๏ Dart is optionally typed.

๏ For Public API’s / Public Methods - Use Type

๏ For internal method implementations, use var.

• Dart IDE will make use of type info also. Easy code assist.

• “Explicit type annotations are usually just visual noise.”

Dart Typed Example

Async / Future๏ One of the most powerful features of Dart

๏ Dart is single threaded, blocking code blocks!

๏ Dart futures lets you perform async operations. I.e HTTP

Dart Future Example

Async / Future - Recap๏ One of the most powerful features of Dart

๏ Dart is single threaded, blocking code blocks!

๏ Dart futures lets you perform async operations. I.e HTTP

๏ Futures make it easy to avoid callback hell and keep syntax simple.

๏ Almost one line API calls. no callbacks needed

Dart Everywhere๏ You can write your Dart apps on the server side also!

๏ Dart on the full stack! Front-end and backend.

๏ Use classes, futures and everything you’ve learned

Simple Dart:io Example

Dart for web๏ Ran through simple but powerful examples.

๏ Dart makes web development easy.

๏ Dart is built to scale, with OOP principals, Async programming made easy and simple to use syntax. Making Dart web apps is easy.

๏ But what’s this polymer thing about?

2Polymer / Web components

What are web components?๏ Next generation of encapsulation for the web.

๏ Build your own tag, hide the implementation details.

Whats the shadow DOM?๏ Shadow DOM hides the web component implementation from the

DOM.

๏ I.e <my-tag> shows up as <my-tag> and not a series of divs.

๏ Ready in firefox, chrome, opera, and their mobile counterparts.

๏ Not in Safari.

๏ Polyfills ready for older browsers and Safari. Mileage may vary

Now what’s Polymer then?๏ Truthfully the web component spec is sometimes messy

๏ Hard to implement on its own.

๏ Polymer wraps all this up in a nice abstraction layer. By Google

๏ Works wherever Web components/ Shadow dom works.

Now what’s Polymer then?

Can I use Polymer with only Dart?๏ No! Polymer can be used with Javascript. In fact it’s first written for JS.

๏ Dart has a feature parity port by Google.

๏ pub : polymer

๏ pub : paper-elements

๏ Polymer is better with Dart. You feel like you are coding for the future.

3Dart meet Polymer

How do you use Polymer with Dart๏ Starter project makes it easy to get started.

๏ Transformer gets polymer all ready to rock.

Dart / Polymer Example

Simple data binding in Polymer๏ You want your components to do something and take attributes

๏ Databinding is simple with polymer.

๏ Lets take a look!

Dart / Polymer Databinding

Simple data binding in Polymer๏ You want your components to do something and take attributes

๏ Databinding is simple with polymer.

๏ @published - is two way binding

๏ @observable - is one way binding

Advanced data binding in Polymer๏ Databind on lists too!

@CustomTag(‘speaker-list')class SpeakerList extends PolymerElement { final List speakers = toObservable(["Speaker One", "Speaker Two", "Speaker Three"]);

SpeakerList() : super.created();}

[ . . . ]

<template repeat=“{{speaker in speakers}}”><li> {{speaker}} </li></template>

Example list data binding in Dart

Advanced data binding in Polymer๏ Databind on lists too!

๏ DAMN THIS IS EASY!!!!

Material Design & Polymer๏ Google introduced this at Google IO

๏ Sexy fluid new UI components for the web & mobile.

๏ “Paper-elements” is a package ready to be used by Dart. In fact many examples have used paper-elements already

๏ Must have polymer: ">=0.14.0 <0.15.0” in your pub

๏ core_elements: ">=0.2.0 <0.3.0"

๏ paper_elements: ">=0.2.0 <0.3.0"

Material Design & Polymer๏ Paper-Elements is the new UI language from Google

๏ Lets take a look at a sample example

Material Design & Polymer๏ Paper-Elements is the new UI language from Google

๏ Do all Material design apps look alike?

• No! You can easily theme them via CSS

• Great resource is http://polymerthemes.com/

Styling Polymer 101๏ Styling Polymer components is straight forward with a few pitfalls.

๏ Use CSS - Duh.

๏ However CSS is encapsulated in your component. No global css styles.

๏ New selectors help with this.

<polymer-element name="x-foo" noscript> <template> <style> :host { /* Note: by default elements are always display:inline. */ display: block; } </style> </template></polymer-element>

Styling Example

<style> x-foo { display: block; } x-foo:hover { opacity: 0; }</style>

Styling from outside

Closing Thoughts๏ Dart is ready for prime time. version 1.6

๏ Polymer still in beta for Dart, but “pretty” stable.

๏ Dart brings sanity to web development.

๏ Polymer/Web components brings proper modularity to web development.

๏ Dart is moving full steam ahead, adopted heavily by Google.

๏ It’s not going anywhere, so embrace change and lets rule the world.

Thank you@FaisalAbid - faisal.abid@gmail.com Title screen by Sam Beck - SamBeck.ca