Google has released Dart 1.5 with improvements for Android Web developers.

Dart is an open-source project for web programming that compiles to JavaScript, and the new release comes just a month after the release of Dart 1.4.

The new version includes a development version of Dartium for Android devices. Dartium consists of the Chrome browser with the Dart Runtime, and the new version is based on Chrome 36. The Dart Editor has also been updated to support debugging mobile web apps written in Dart. According to a the announcement of the updated version, you can set breakpoints and debug exceptions with Dart web apps running on a device with the same development flow that exists on your development machine.

In the his summary of the updates on Google Groups, Kevin Moore of the Dart team says that the core SDK has been improved with extra properties for the HTTP client, and new MapMixin, SetMixin and SetBase properties for the dart collection.

Pub offers better version resolution, support for lazy transformers, and optimized startup for pub build and serve. The performance of pub serve on Windows has also been improved.

The Editor has seen the majority of the improvements, with the ability to launch and debug on a connected Android device. The editor is also now integrated with Observatory, the formatting has been improved, and memory use has been reduced. If you do get to a stage where memory is running low, you’ll now be warned, and given recommendations on what to do to improve available memory.

The Observatory has also been worked on, and has a better allocation profile page with faster refresh. The code coverage UI and code coverage collection have been improved, as have the VM and Isolate landing pages.

A Debian wheezy binary package has been developed so you can get the Dart SDK on a Debian server. This means you can now use Dart on the server as well as the client.

The announcement also says:

“We have also released an update to the Dart Polymer package and shipped two sets of new Polymer elements. core_elements gives Dart developers access to all Polymers infrastructure components. paper_elements contains Polymer elements that follow the material design pattern that was announced at Google I/O 2014.”  

So there is no excuse for avoiding the material design aesthetic no matter what language you program in.  

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