Monday, March 17, 2014

Lack of UI libraries in Angular Dart

So I'm still slowly chugging along playing with Angular Dart.

The thing that's bothering me now is, because the it's such a new language/framework, is the lack of decent UI stuff. I needed a pretty date picker for my test project. I could either use the HTML5 date picker which isn't supported in half the browsers out there, or write my own.  I guess I could alternatively import all of jQuery and figure out how to get Angular Dart to talk to a jQuery widget. Ugh.  I finally found someone that had written one using WebUI, a deprecated system for making widgets in Dart, and managed to port it over to Angular. (if you are reading this and need one, email me!)

Tonight it was an autocompleter that I needed. Again, I ended up spending awhile converting a WebUI widget. Which is great practice for learning a language and framework, so I'm not complaining too much. But it certainly cuts down on the productivity.

The way components in Angular Dart are written, I can envision a world with a huge library of simple-to-use UI components. It's MUCH MUCH MUCH cleaner than trying to pull in javascript libraries for a widget. But I guess there's just not any real community or momentum behind the project yet.

2 comments:

tkrotoff said...

Check https://github.com/akserg/angular.dart.ui

The more advanced UI toolkit for AngularDart as of today.
You can also contribute to it :)

Nathan said...

Yeah, it looks like that's the best option currently available. I don't really want to be married to bootstrap, and I needed a working datePicker (which it looks like is currently in the works), so I skipped it for now.

Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of other options currently :-/

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