Web app support requirements

I had a quick play around with the Debugger for Chrome extension in a branch today (web) and using pub serve. Seems like it’s not hard to launch pub serve and then start a debug session using the other extension (if installed; otherwise show an error).

We need Code 1.15 in order to hook the debug session ending to terminate pub serve, but that’s not too far off.

However, while working on this I started wondering about people writing a backend in Dart - is pub serve the correct thing here? Will they also need us to run dart bin/server.dart to run their backend? Would this be instead of pub serve or as well as? Having two endpoint seems a bit weird but a custom web server/backend isn’t going to be compiling the frontend/providing source maps, etc.

@devoncarew Do you have any thoughts on this? How common is launching for a Dart web server as well the frontend app? If other IDEs support this, how is it normally configured?

[DanTup]

@mnordine sorry, I should’ve documented this better. You should use a standard Dart launch config, not chrome. Using Chrome was the old workaround which ran webdev as a task.

The example project used in the integration tests is here:

https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/tree/master/src/test/test_projects/web/hello_world

And its launch.json looks like this:

		{
			"name": "Dart",
			"program": "web/index.html",
			"request": "launch",
			"type": "dart"
		}

Things like debugging are still very much work in progress, but please do open issues for anything that doesn’t work right (or suggestions to improve it).

[DanTup]

@Lisenish You are correct. Today Dart Code has no support for running/debugging web apps.

There is some discussion in this thread you may be interested in though:

https://github.com/dart-lang/build/issues/1025

There’s a few things in there:

1. A way of setting up launch.json so that you can press F5 to launch the browser/run your web app
2. Instructions on getting the Chrome Debug extension to use the source maps so you can debug

I haven’t personally used these much; I expect the experience is not perfect, but I think you can get a reasonable way without any official support in Dart Code for now.

Long-term, I’d still love to get to the point where you can “just press F5” for a web app; but right now Flutter is the main focus (though as always, PRs are welcome and I can provide assistance if anyone wants to take a go - the discussion in the above thread has some reasonable first steps).