Learn Dart, Microsoft and Serverless

Starting from a prebuilt frontend, Jason Lengstorf guides you through the creation of a "Corgi Up-boop App" that uses Netlify Functions and Hasura. You can view [the deployed final product on Netlify](https://egghead-serverless-functions.netlify.app/).

You'll set up the Netlify CLI, and configure a local development environment before writing and deploying functions with a few different use cases.

The first example function bypasses CORS restrictions to retrieve corgi data from an example third-party API.

Next, you'll configure environmental variables to securely communicate with the Unsplash API without exposing private keys to the client.

Serverless functions don't persist data by themselves, so we will use  Hasura to create a GraphQL API for tracking the number of "boops" each corgi receives.

This course is an excellent illustration of the speed of Serverless functions, and how fast you can implement functionality in your web applications.

An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS.

netlify

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

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

Create a serverless application and deploy it in under thirty minutes!

We'll be using Netlify, Vite, TypeScript, and React in our project. This stack synergizes extremely well for rapidly developing professional-quality applications. 

If you haven't heard of Vite, it's the French word for quick! It's also a build tool that consists of a dev-server and an extremely fast bundler. It makes for a rapid development loop.

As for the rest. Netlify makes hosting fast and easy with serverless functions and continuous deployment. React enables you to quickly create reusable components. And TypeScript helps you write cleaner code that is easier to refactor. 

So get started and learn how to use this stack in your own applications!

Create a TypeScript powered serverless React application

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

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

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.

Understand Classes and Inheritance in Dart

In this lesson, we will cover Interfaces and Mixins. Interfaces act as a contract containing properties and methods that a class must define once it “implements” this interface. Mixins are Dart’s way of sharing properties and methods from multiple classes, since by design Dart adopts a single-inheritance model.

Define Interfaces and Share Class Members through Mixins in Dart

Futures represent a computation that does not complete immediately. Where a normal function returns a result, an asynchronous function returns a Future that will eventually contain the result. These are similar to Promises in JavaScript. In this lesson, we will learn how to program asynchronously by writing logic to capture values that are returned at a later time.

Capture and Return Asynchronous Values with Futures in Dart

In this lesson we’ll learn how to create an Android emulator in Android Studio & run a Flutter project on an Android Emulator.

Run a Flutter App on Android

In this lesson, we'll learn how to specify a configuration object containing all of the routes for our application & navigate between them in a Flutter application.

Navigation with Named Routes in Flutter

When creating a new Flutter application, you are given a simple templated Flutter project whose primary code lives in the main.dart file. In this lesson, we walk through this file & talk about what the boilerplate code is doing.

Walkthrough of the Default Flutter Application Boilerplate

In this lesson we’ll learn how to style Text & Container widgets & also get a general understanding of how styling works in Flutter applications

Style a Flutter Text and Container Widget

In this lesson we’ll learn how to use themes in order to share colors and font styles throughout our application.