Author: Ewald Horn

Moving to Dart from C++

June 24, 2019 Ewald Horn

A couple of days ago, while recovering from some flu, I managed to catch up a bit of me reading. If you know anything about the life of an independent contractor, you'd know that there's never time for your personal projects or hobbies, so this was a most welcome break.

One of my favorite blogs is this one and I saw a great article on Sorting vectors in C++ by Nic Raboy. As it happens, C++ is one of my first commercial languages and I still make some moderate use of it for various mobile projects.

One thing that struck me, as I read the code, was how close this was to the Dart programming language. I've been doing a lot of Flutter development of late, and have been making more use of the Dart programming language. Mobile applications often contain complex logic, and this is where Dart has really proven it's worth to me, in both being a concise and expressive language, but also being familiar enough that I didn't have to learn everything from scratch to be productive.

In this short tutorial, we'll take the quicksort algorithm Nic has built in C++ and convert it to Dart. Along the way, we'll see how close Dart is to C++ and how much of your existing C++ knowledge easily transfers to the Dart environment.

Building a Simple Web Application in Dart

April 24, 2019 Ewald Horn

Dart is a programming language developed by Google and made popular by Flutter, their mobile development framework for cross-platform application development.

The Dart language is a general-purpose language, built to be used for far more than just mobile development, and, in this short tutorial, I will show you how to build a basic web application, using Dart.

Using NW.js To Convert A Website Into A Desktop Application

August 8, 2018 Ewald Horn

A while ago, I ran into a situation where I needed to make web application into a desktop application for a corporate client. The idea was to leverage as much of the existing app as possible, while still meeting the requirement of having a "desktop" application.

As a primarily Java developer, I had no idea how to do this, so I started doing research and found out that my best bet would be using JavaScript technologies.

Enter NW.js, a powerful mashup of Google Chrome and Node.js that allows you to package a web application to be run on the desktop.