Introducing the WebStorm IDE

WebStorm is the premiere development environment for Dart and was created by JetBrains, which also publishes IntelliJ IDEA for Java and ReSharper for .Net.

WebStorm is a commercial package available at https://www.jetbrains.com/. There are free licenses available for many and deep discounts for individuals. It supports a range of languages and development platforms and Dart support is provided via a plug-in. The plugin comes pre-installed with the IDE.

Download the installation file and follow the installation steps on screen:

WebStorm has a number of powerful features to help write our web applications:

Alternative development environments

If you wish to use another IDE, there are plugins for IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse. If you prefer a simple text editor, there are plugins for Sublime, Emacs, and Vim. These are all listed on the DartLang download page.

If you are an avid Visual Studio user, there is a community project underway to bring Dart to that environment. DartVS can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery. It directly uses the DartAnalyzer from the SDK to report errors, warnings, and hints inside the IDE. Support for intellisense and other features is underway, too.

The Atom Editor (https://atom.io/) is an alternative for those who prefer a lightweight editor to a fully fledged development environment. The plugin, named dartlang (https://atom.io/packages/dartlang) provides code-completion, syntax highlighting, and access to some pub commands.

Help starting a project

To help create your new project, Dart has a tool called Stagehand that creates the scaffolding from a high quality project template of your choice. It takes care of common tasks such as folder structure, common libraries, and style sheets. It even has its own website (http://stagehand.pub/).

In WebStorm, creating a new project presents you with a range of powerful options, allowing you to set the locations of the Dart SDK and choose a project type for sample content. The project type gives a range of skeleton applications and is powered by the Stagehand application that is part of the SDK:

Stagehand can also be run from the command line, with the first step being to install it as a command:

pub global activate stagehand

This step installs the stagehand command from the stagehand package:

mkdir aproject
cd aproject
stagehand web-full

This will create a folder of sample content based on the web-full template.

Elsewhere in the SDK

The download also includes a set of command-line tools, which can be found under the dart-sdk/bin path.

Also in this location is a snapshots folder. Most of the tools are written in Dart itself; when they are started up and initialized, a binary image of the initialized state can be stored and used for future executions of the program.

The snapshots are generated using the Dart executable and are mostly intended for frequently used command-line applications in deployment.