The programming language Dart gained momentum throughout 2018. Our readers voted it as the number one programming language that will be most relevant to them in 2019 and that they want to hear about.
On May 8 2019, the Dart team announced the latest optimized stable release: Dart 2.3. Does the new release hit the bullseye? The new release focuses on building better, optimized user interfaces.
Let’s see what’s new.
v2.3 features
The latest release aims to improve the process of building better user interfaces.
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From the release announcement blog, here are some of the improvements for building list-based, conditional, or repeated UI:
- Spread operator feature: Insert elements from one list into another list
- Null-aware spread operator: For using the spread operator feature when the element to the right of the spread operator may be null
- Collection if: Build collections using conditionals
- Collection for: Manipulate the items of a list before adding them to another list.
- New lints for configuring in static analysis: New linter rules added for the new features
These features also come packaged in the Flutter 1.5 release, which arrived on May 7. They are all fully composable features.
IDE UI and improvements
With v2.3, IDE support gets a small makeover with UI Guides. Horizontal and vertical lines make for a much more natural way to read code that is more organized and easier on the eyes.
Check it out here in the Flutter plugin.
UI Guide example. Source.
For now the UI guides are available in v35.2 of the IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio plugin. However, the Dart team states that they plan to implement them in VS Code in the future.
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The latest version also adds auto-importing from code competition. Auto-import lists libraries that users have not yet imported during auto-complete. When selecting the library, it will then be automatically imported. Auto-import is available in VS Code with the addition of the v2.26 plugin and in IntelliJ 2019.1.
This feature will also be added to Android Studio 3.5 when it releases.
Hitting the bullseye
New to Dart? Test out the language in the playground here and explore some of the given samples. Get the latest Dart SDK. (Or, build the SDK from the source on GitHub.)
Grab the top packages on the newly revamped pub.dev website. See the language FAQ here for any newcomer questions.
As always, report any bugs in this new release and feel free to leave the Dart team suggestions for future versions. Happy programming!
The post Dart version 2.3 adds new features for improved UI building appeared first on JAXenter.
Source : JAXenter
