Learn Aphrodite, Babel and Dart

Dart is an object-oriented language you can use for building web applications, server-side code, and even mobile apps. It’s expressive, powerful, and has a friendly learning curve. 

In this course, we will look at the syntax and semantics of the Dart programming language. We will also cover various aspects of the Dart ecosystem, including its tools and packages that help make you a productive developer. This knowledge is applicable when developing software for client, server, and especially mobile with the Flutter framework. 

This course is beginner-friendly, but is well-suited for experience programmers as well. 

Dart is an open-source, scalable programming language, with robust libraries and runtimes, for building web, server, and mobile apps.

dart

Get Started with Dart

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

[Aphrodite](https://github.com/Khan/aphrodite) is a library styling React components.

You get all the benefits of inline styles (encapsulation, no build step, no CSS cascade, building up styling with JavaScript instead of a preprocessor language) with all the benefits of CSS (animations and transitions, pseudo-classes, media queries).

Learn how to use Aphrodite to style reusable React components.

Styling React Components With Aphrodite

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

Writing next generation JavaScript with Babel 5 (out of date)

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Webpack loaders are how you tell webpack to resolve your dependencies and you can use a loader built for the babel transpiler to easily enable ES6 code in your project. Full sourcemap support is also available using webpack's devtool property.

Webpack Loaders, Source Maps, and ES6

In this lesson, you will write a basic HTTP server in the Dart programming language. We will be using the HttpServer class from Dart's inbuilt 'dart:io' library to achieve this.

Dart is an object-oriented programming language by Google, which aims to help the developer build modern web applications. It covers client, server and now mobile with Flutter. It comes with a range of tools including a virtual machine, core libraries, and package management repository, lending enough ammunition to start your next project.

Learn more at https://dartlang.org


Write a Basic HTTP Server in Dart

In this lesson, you will setup your first command-line Dart application. We will install the SDK and write our first program. This will form the basis for future lessons where we further explore the Dart ecosystem.

Dart is an object-oriented programming language by Google, which aims to help the developer build modern web applications. It covers client, server and now mobile with Flutter. It comes with a range of tools including a virtual machine, core libraries, and package management repository, lending enough ammunition to start your next project.

Learn more at https://dartlang.org



Setup your first Dart project

In this lesson, we will look at how to create variables and constants. These are containers that store data for later reference and/or retrieval.

Dart is an object-oriented programming language by Google, which aims to help the developer build modern web applications. It covers client, server and now mobile with Flutter. It comes with a range of tools including a virtual machine, core libraries, and package management repository, lending enough ammunition to start your next project.

Learn more at https://dartlang.org

Understand Variables and Constants in Dart

In this lesson, we will cover Dart's inbuilt data types. Everything in Dart is an object, and therefore there are no primitive data types. In other words, all types extend a base type named Object. Any identifier without a value is set to null by default. There is no "undefined" value.

Dart is an object-oriented programming language by Google, which aims to help the developer build modern web applications. It covers client, server and now mobile with Flutter. It comes with a range of tools including a virtual machine, core libraries, and package management repository, lending enough ammunition to start your next project.

Learn more at https://dartlang.org

Understand Built-in types in Dart

Converting all of our modern JavaScript into ES5 compatible syntax is a great way to use modern features while targeting older browsers. What happens when the browsers natively support these language features? Then it no longer makes sense to transform that code or to include polyfills that will go unused. In this lesson, we’ll add the `@babel/polyfill` package and configure `babel-preset-env`

Target specific browsers with babel-preset-env and the babel pollyfill

In this lesson, we’ll install Babel and use it from the terminal to see how it can take JavaScript that uses modern language features and output JavaScript that will run in down-level browsers.

Transform Modern JavaScript Features with Babel

In this lesson, we'll configure webpack to use the Babel loader for our JavaScript files, allowing us to transpile our source files and generate a bundle for deploying our application.

Configure webpack to Load JavaScript Files through Babel with babel-loader

In this lesson, we'll add React and ReactDOM to our project and create an entry point for the React application. We'll also configure Babel with the React preset so Babel can transpile our JSX into JavaScript that will run in a browser.

Configure babel for React with preset-react

We transpile our JavaScript code so we can use modern language features, even if browser support isn't quite where we need it to be. This includes proposed features that aren't yet part of the official language specification. In this lesson, we'll see how we can support the proposed class property syntax for JavaScript with a Babel plugin.

Support Proposed JavaScript Features with Babel Plugins

One approach to building high performance applications with `webpack` is to take advantage of code-splitting to only load the needed JavaScript on initial load and asynchronously load additional JavaScript bundles when needed. In this lesson, we'll create add some code-splitting to our placeholder application and configure our project to support the dynamic `import()` syntax.

Asynchronously Load webpack Bundles through Code-splitting and React Suspense

Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.

flutter

We will setup our first command-line Dart application. We will use the apt-get package manager on Ubuntu to install the SDK and write our first program. This will prepare you to follow along in the next lessons.

Get the gist of commands → https://gist.github.com/creativebracket/b44ee73739f249be0d5f4b8676e8eca5

Set up your first Dart project on Linux

In this lesson, we will look at the different forms of creating parameters that are optional, namely positional and named. Optional positional arguments are useful when specifying a default value for a particular parameter. Optional named parameters are useful for specifying parameter defaults and writing self-documenting functions and methods.

Define Optional Named and Positional Parameters for Functions and Methods in Dart

In this lesson, we will look at various ways we can control the flow of our Dart code. Control flow statements allow us to break up the flow of code by employing decision-making, looping, branching and enabling our program to conditionally execute particular blocks of code. Dart adopts common control flow statements such as if/else, switch, while, do-while and for loops.

Control Flow Statements in Dart

We will setup our first command-line Dart application. We will use the Chocolatey package manager to install the SDK and write our first  program. This will form the basis for future lessons.

Get Chocolatey → https://chocolatey.org/docs/installation

Get the gist of commands → https://gist.github.com/creativebracket/128dafcbbfdc1d6946231a931f95cb1b

Setup your first Dart project on Windows

We will look at how we can create classes and explore some various features. Dart adopts a single-inheritance model, meaning that you can only extend a single class. We will therefore extend our class example by creating an Employee subclass of a parent Person class.