Rikulo one source code for all platforms

Following the previous article, here is a first early dart adopter company, who has clear future success in the
programming high tech field

http://rikulo.org/

With Dart you can target all browsers with one source code. With Rikulo, you can target all mobile platforms with one version of the mobile view layer.

Why I think dart will detrone Java

The IT world is a very slow motion ecosystem, but when it comes to some very few technologies, things can go blazingly fast. Think about the iOs and xCode: a brand new system, a brand new language and millions of people adopting it the first year of its birth.

Java was also at some time a weird new language in the start of the millennium, but it promised twice a better programming speed performance against C++, the leading language at that time. Their one sentence argument was valid: resembles to C++ but removes the bug risky features. And it worked

We face today a new problem: proliferation of websites, each web site must be compatible with many browsers, many phones with different systems and/or different screen sizes, some people think that we will get back to the "all in html" philosophy because it becomes hard to write a native application for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows, and the other platforms. Some others invented the MEAP concept to compile an existing javascript web site to many native mobile platforms with a few code adapting

And I think that Google is preparing something big with Dart. Why?

Statistics say that programmers always wrote the same quantity of line code per day in all IT history. Humans can't express more lines than they do. So in a matter of speeding up programmers, if we cannot make them write faster, let's make them express themselves in less lines. That's the concept of expressiveness that was widely used by Ruby and Groovy to justify the reason they even exist, and they are right.

Dart was not made of "ideas" of what could be great, Google has put experts in language theory to decide the syntax. So it's not one smart guy, it's a smart team that already had a feedback on the ruby experience that created the language.

Now think about GWT, we now have a strong basis of companies solving the many browsers issue by writing their code one in java and having it compiled to all browser specific javascripts. Dart replaced the old GWT compiler, we can now write natively in dart to get javascript (without the .class bridge)

Add a Meap tool to your existing javascript website, and you instantly target all mobile platforms (PhoneGap seems to do it with few issues, but there are)

We have here a one base code for all, ideal world, but who can do it today? do you know many companies who do that out of their R&D projects? I don't.

So just imagine for an instant that Google announces you can write your application in Dart to have it compiled on all websites + all android screen sizes (that is possible when you do responsive web design). Android has 70% of the phone market already. People who were writing their android applications in java will not move to dart, but those who had to solve the problem of writing a website for all browsers + all mobile platforms will see a clear way to make economies on his investment.

So Dalvik 2 is getting out with Android 4.4, it already compiles .class files to the native format when installing the app: no more Dalvik VM (which drastically improoved performance). The next step for me is a no more JVM : because as you (should) know, java is written in Java: that means that "à part" some very low operations that are native like 'copy memory', all processing is done in java code, which is not hardware optimized: so the processor has to do statistical predictions to compensate the fact that it cannot know what is the java VM preparing to do...

My deduction from the fact that Google didn't announce you can write your Android application in Dart, besides the huge investment that is behind this language (auto-completion editor, very active community, GWT's official compiler) iiiis: they are preparing something bigger

You cannot hide for a too long Google, we know there's something on the way in your labs, so just say it :-)

So my prediction, is there will be a PhoneGap for Dart, or something of this kind... And this will make Dart the center of the world: it will natively compile to web sites and through the meap procedures and thanks to responsiveness, all phone platforms will be targeted. At the end, what made java beat C++ is what will make dart beat Java: one code for all

And you? do you think that java can be replaced one day?

By Zied Hamdi (1Vu.fr founder)