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Google Ports Box2D Demo To Dart
mikejuk writes with an excerpt from an article at i-programmer about a neat graphics demo written in Dart: "One of the difficulties in getting a new computer language accepted by a wider audience is that there is doubt that it is real. Is it a toy language that just proves a concept or can it do real work? In the case of Dart, which is Google's replacement for JavaScript, the development is speeding ahead at a rate that is impressive but worrying. To prove that Dart is already a language that can be used, we now have a port of the well known 2D physics engine Box2D, the one Angry Birds uses, to Dart."
Box2D has previously been ported to Javascript. Source is available at Google Code (under the Apache license). Note that you'll need Chromium to run the demos.
Note that you'll need Chromium to run the demos
As a web developer and after all the nuisance old IE's gave me and other web developers back in the day, this is really what's stupid with Chromium and Google's approach. They're mimicking the old Microsoft here - make your own "standards" and break the web by making features and sites that only work Google's browser. I seriously thought we would had been past that and the old IE's were the last browsers that didn't adhere to standards. IE9 is now fully standards compliant, and what does Google do? Oh yes, break the web AGAIN.
This isn't the only time they're introduced non-standards compliant features, either. Another example is NaCl, or Native Client, which tries to mimic Microsoft's ActiveX, and again, only works in Chrome. But with all the security headaches. It seems like Google is going out of it's way to copy all the stupid mistakes Microsoft made. I guess Google is at the same point now than Microsoft was back then - antitrust issues, breaking web standards and constant flow of news of how they're done wrong again. It's like Microsoft all again.
The "shill" accusations flying around on Slashdot lately are getting out of control. Any position orthogonal to the common convention is accused, trashed, and filtered off the site.
So pointing out that MS screwed up in the past and using concrete examples that another company is making the same mistake is somehow MS propaganda? MS did some crap (works, Vista, IE 7, patent crap threatening without stating exactly what is being infringed, etc), they did some good things (Win 95-8 (for it's day was really cool if not exactly that stable), Win 7, .Ne/VS I'd put in that list), but regardless saying someone other than MS is being stupid doesn't make you an MS shill.
Nobody ever claimed such.
However, just because someone has reached a conclusion you don't like doesn't make them mentally deranged or a paid astroturfer. If you believe a position to be wrong, it's so much more persuasive to respond to the points one by one rather than shoo them off with personal attacks, which only serves to please those who already agreed with you.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Little IDE support is helped by building IDEs, not coming up with a new language that has even less IDE support.
Dart doesn't do type safety by default. There have been proposals to add optional type annotations of the sort Dart _does_ have to JS... and they were shot down by certain members of the JS standards committee, last I checked. Don't recall what the stance of Google's representatives on it was, but they weren't the ones pushing it.
As far as a compile phase goes, Dart doesn't have one either unless you're cross-compiling it to JavaScript. You just load your Dart code directly in the browser, which then compiles it. That's what browsers do with JS too.
So ignoring for the moment whether these things are good or not, I don't see Dart making much of an improvement over JS here, except in the type-safety department, where Google didn't exactly try to improve JS in the first place.
ActiveX was an "open" standard in the sense that Netscape could have implemented it if they wanted to ..... on Windows only. That's because the bulk of the APIs you needed to use to write an ActiveX control were just the regular Win32 APIs. Netscape had a policy of supporting not just Windows but all operating systems. That's why Microsoft made ActiveX - they saw weakness (other platforms gui frameworks kind of sucked at the time, so pandering to them restricted developers a lot), and they attempted to exploit it (by allowing developers to build better apps that were Windows only).
Was ActiveX "evil"? Well, it was certainly platform specific. Making things like this NOT platform specific is a ton of work, NaCL uses techniques and technologies that didn't exist back then, and they had no incentives to do it. Whether it was wrong to do depends on your views on the importance of features vs platform independence.
NaCL is different to ActiveX in some really important, fundamental ways. Firstly, the APIs it exposes to native code are really small: just Pepper, which provides you with the real basics along with some well accepted cross-platform APIs like OpenGL. Importantly there's no GUI toolkit. If you want buttons and sliders, you need to use HTML, not Win32/GTK/Cocoa. In fact NaCL will prevent you from accessing these APIs entirely!
Secondly, it's got a strong focus on security. NaCL code has security properties that are provable using static analysis. It also runs in a sandbox for a second level of defence. This is very different to ActiveX, which relied entirely on Authenticode, and suffered some serious UI problems that made it vulnerable (modal dialog boxes).
Thirdly, everything you need to implement NaCL is open source, so other browser makers can (and maybe will) adopt it. The core runtime and execution technologies are all open source, with the bulk of the integration work being joining Pepper to your browser. Mozilla already supports Pepper and I guess other browsers will too soon (maybe not IE). It really wasn't possible for Netscape to support ActiveX for all their users in the 90s, but it's quite feasible for Apple, Microsoft, MozCorp and Opera to support all their users with NaCL, especially now the dependency on x86 has been broken.
No, the problem is brand new accounts using a distortion of the facts to push an agenda (pro or anti a specific company). The problem was never that Microsoft added new features to IE. Individual vendors adding things to their browsers is how we got all of the features of the modern web - including images! The problems were that they implemented features that were tied closely to Windows (e.g. ActiveX: run a Windows x86 binary in a web page) and that they pushed their developer tools, which generated IE-specific output that was incompatible with other browsers.
The standard way of adding new features to the web, since it's creation, has been for one vendor to add them to a browser, for users to experiment with them, and if they're useful for them to be implemented by multiple vendors and standardised.
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