Show HN: Aqueduct – Dart on the Server (opens in new tab)

Good questions, thank you. Aqueduct initially started as a proof of concept - as a mobile shop, Dart was just so familiar to the languages we often used and it ran on the server. We tried building a few things and everyone was able to pick it up so quickly, and it took off internally from there. The value to us as mobile developers is that there was less context switching than when jumping into Ruby or JS (and all the other reasons we aren't quite fans of JS.)

Yes, multi-threading is accomplished through isolates. The application is run as a replica on a number of isolates, configurable by a command line option.

Each isolate has its own database connection, etc., but operate exactly the same. This behavior doesn't require any additional effort by the developer. (edit: The initialization code sets up a reactive channel for requests, each isolate instantiates that channel, and Dart's VM manages delivering an HTTP request to the most appropriate isolate.)

So, it's not quite like Erlang/Elixir where each connection gets its own process, rather the default number of isolates is 3. Isolates have their own heap, so memory isn't shared across them, but there is a message hub that isolates can send values across. This is useful when say you have websockets connected to different isolates and you want to broadcast a message to all of them.

You can spawn additional isolates from a 'web server isolate' to move computation to another thread.

Whats your perspective of the activity around the Dart VM? Is Google actively maintaining it? As a JS dev I always wrote it off as being a non-starter, but your project has intrigued me to taking a second look at the VM. Thanks!

Since this is targeted a developers, it's worth looking at the intro pages of similar tools - flask and spark come to mind but there are others in the same vein. The slideshow with vague verbiage which is often not obviously related to the code being shown just doesn't make any sense.

"Compose modular maintainable code" or "Achieve the productivity of a cohesive framework" doesn't really say anything at all - you can replace that whole thing with a random code snippet and a big title that says "Aqueduct - now, more than ever!".

I have a general question about Dart and would appreciate any thoughts.

How have you found Dart as a server-side language? What's the performance like and the ease of development?

First impressions of Dart are positive. However, the server-side (interpreted) language landscape is dominated by Python, Ruby, PHP etc. Any thoughts on choosing Dart for server-side programming over these other common languages and what you think the advantages are? Many thanks.

Thank you for sharing your project.

I am unable to read the examples on the homepage as they scroll by too fast. Could you please do both of: increase the time each example stays on screen; and disable the automatic scrolling if the user makes an effort to select a particular example either by clicking the side arrows or the selector tabs on the bottom.

Not convenient, you'll have to define a route for every single file instead of having a folder serving static content.