I have a flutter application running on the Dart programming language. I have published an npm package that I want to use in my flutter application. Is there any way I can use the existing npm package in dart or somehow automatically convert npm package to dart package?
Dart and Javascript are different programming languages. While it might be possible to transpile you lib from js to dart, it is not easily doable, nor maintainable, and most likely not generalisable.
Unless you are comfortable with both languages and their limitations, you should not try to convert an NPM package to some Dart code unless you don't have any other choice.
I would advise you to rewrite the NPM package in Dart instead.
REMARK : this answer is based on the hypothesis that you don't want to integrate JS code in a webview but actually use the code inside the Dart VM.
It really depends on what you are going for,
Are you compiling your flutter app for web ?
Dart's JS library might be what you're looking for...
Are you going to compile for Android?
Then there's Android JS, Flutter_liquidcore, Interactive_WebView.
It Really depends on what you are expecting the application to compile to.
But don't expect native app experience...
We converted a fairly large js library to dart (manually) it was surprisingly easy as the two languages are very similar.
Tl:Dr: Use a WebView or run a Node/Deno/SpiderNode subprocess.
Let me answer the title of your question; you're going to have to wrap it in a webview or a node.js subprocess that can communicate over IPC using something like DBUS. This is cutting edge hard experimental tech as of 2021.
If it's a small we'll tested package, you could babel transpile it to Dart and automatically run the tests.
if it's a large package like Nuxt, forget about it, or put it in a WebView.
If it's your own package, consider translating it to Dart and then transpiling to JavaScript. It's Trivial to go from Dart to readable Node/ES2021.
But do you want to really use Dart for everything? Will the community for Dart be as strong as the Trois, Vue, WebXR typescript community in 5 to 80 years?
My advice would be to use Dart for what it's good for, client side JavaScript. And use well tested packages that can transpile from TypeScript to Dart, or a webview.
Could you use glue subprocesses to run node/deno/spidernode? see the Termux F-Droid debacle, where if you want to run a Node server on the latest version of Termux, you can't use the Google Play Store, but F-Droid. Basically, JIT will make your App Store approval process slower, but they will only be able to ban it from a policy standpoint, not from a technical one. You should not use npm install, but instead bundle the installed modules with the released app build.
How does the deprecation of JIT play in a world of Fuku native like PWA's and Spectre? From a security perspective, deploying to Kotlin/Swift is a narrow minded way of outsourcing the responsibility of making compiler patches happen, you should be building at least one a month, or leave the business. From a privacy perspective, the handshakes and huristic privacy protections will come to PWAs as hard as they will for binary apps.
Related
I have a monorepo (Nx Workspace) that has many libraries that were generated with #nrwl/js. These libraries depend on each other. They are small utility libraries that I intend to publish on NPM as separate packages.
According to Nx docs:
#nrwl/js is particularly useful if you want to
Create framework agnostic, just plain TypeScript libraries within an existing Nx workspace (say to use in your React, Node or Angular app)
Publish TypeScript packages to NPM
Yet, I now realize that the build command associated with #nrwl/js does not take into account a library's dependencies on other libraries in order to include them as peerDependencies into its publishable package.json. It also looks like it is making just a simple commonjs build that would be compatible with node.js but not with browsers.
I know that #nrwl/angular takes care of all that stuff for you when you build a library with it if you had marked it as publishable. My question is how do I get the same behavior but for a library that is not meant for Angular but for general purpose Javascript use in any framework or environment.
It's still early in development so if a solution to my problem would involve regenerating the libs using some other Nx generator, it wouldn't be too much of a hassle for me to do so, and I'd consider it.
Edit
I have since changed the build executor to #nrwl/node, which has the buildable and publishable options and behave the way I need.
I believe that #nrwl/js will eventually gain that ability but as of 2022-01-05 it didn't have it. For now, someone looking to publish libraries on NPM probably should use #nrwl/node to generate his new library projects and not #nrwl/js
If you want to publish a NPM package as a "universal package" to be consumed by Node.js and the browser, you would need to build it as UMD, to cover most consumer environments.
Though modern browsers support ES modules (import and export), you might need extra setup steps to consume them.
I've recently installed some npm package (recommended Kubernetes client) for my react app.
After writing code that uses the package and deploying the code for testing I got some weird errors about missing functions or packages. Then I've read the documentation and realized that the package was Node-only.
Is there any way to check that the npm package works in browser before writing code that uses the package?
Python packages specify compatible python versions. Do npm packages have something like this whether they indicate support for particular Node versions and the browsers?
Some packages/libraries contain .browserlistrc file which I've found to be a starting point to find out the browsers and platforms the devs intend to support or have their code compile for. While it may not always be true and the package might just be able to support a browser that isn't mentioned, it's a good starting point. It surely helps to find out if IE (the bane of front-end dev) is supported or not.
Then again many packages don't necessarily include a .browserlistrc. You can then check the package.json for a "browserslist" field.
If neither are found, you can always clone the repo and add your own .browserlistrc in the root with queries that will let you know if the package supports your intended browser or platform - little more work but yeah it can help. Not full proof but a decent enough way to find out.
Though the best answer is really to just ask the maintainers.
Recently, node package manager is very popular and doing a lot of job for us, however it is really difficult to understand what is going on under the hood. I really like simple tags to insert Vue, Babel etc. Haven't worked on big projects, I really wonder is there any disadvantages using script tags over npm-cli.
When you npm install a library, plugin, extension, etc it can be declared as a dependency with a --save flag. In doing so it is marked as a dependency in your package.json file, which is key to version control for your dependencies. If you just use the CDN you are pulling in a path to a library that may be deprecated at some point in the future.
During development it is ok to use CDNs, but in production it is not good practice for dependencies (though I do it for certain exceptions, such as a google font).
I've been developing in Aurelia-CLI for about 3 months and like it so far. I think it's a solid framework and obviously escalating in support and usage. That's a good thing!
Before I develop much more of my large app, I'm wondering if I'm using the best build system. I've only tried Aurelia-CLI and am not really familiar with Webpack or JSPM, and therefore I don't know what I'm missing. Are there any clear advantages or disadvantages in using either of the other two build systems, or is using the CLI the most clean and supported approach? Since I'm developing independently, I don't have any external constraints.
Thanks for your help.
UPDATE
This answer is almost two years old. Feel free to research updates and provide another more complete answer and I can replace this answer or point to that answer. Thanks!
Aurelia CLI
Aurelia CLI is great for getting started. It's important to understand that under the covers the CLI is using require.js but proxies the configuration through aurelia.json in your application. This means that you need to understand how to configure aurelia to work with require.js at the moment. Once you need to start configuring to match your workflow or change build steps up it gets a bit cumbersome at the moment. We are working to improve this. There are many features planned for the Aurelia CLI but given at the time of writing this that it is in an alpha / beta state it should generally be used on proof of concept or other smaller apps, not production-ready large scale apps yet.
WebPack
WebPack is arguably the most popular kid on the block at the moment. WebPack is not a module loader, but a bundler. It's important to understand this because while we strive to make Aurelia work great with all module loaders WebPack by default is not in charge of loading modules so a dynamically loaded application requires the developer to expand on this. WebPack is strong in creating optimized bundles and can be easy to use as long as you are comfortable with configure WebPack. WebPack has considerably more GitHub stars due to the popularity from React using WebPack it's hard to say whether the choice is better when using Aurelia simply because of the number of GitHub stars.
JSPM / System.js
Some of the skeletons use JSPM and System.js. The reason is that these are the closest to 'spec compliant' solutions. JSPM tries to help as much as possible when loading from the JSPM registry. If not yet available in the registry you can load from NPM or GitHub directly. From a module loading perspective you use a config.js file that is (usually) automatically maintained when installing dependencies to improve the developer workflow.
Side biased note
On most larger apps at the moment I typically prefer using JSPM / System.js simply because I have a great understanding of the tooling and prefer the control that I am provided. I work on a great number of Aurelia apps that are in production and typically reserve CLI for smaller proof of concept apps and WebPack is a great alternative but I prefer the flexibility and understanding I have with JSPM / System.js at the moment.
The CLI isn't currently feature complete, but it is a much simpler setup. Webpack can basically do anything you want to do, but you'll be maintaining your webpack configuration just as much as you maintain your Aurelia code.
Ok, maybe not just as much, but you'll have to learn Webpack to use webpack. The Aurelia CLI is simple to get started, but has some definite limitations. For example, CSS files that reference external resources won't work w/the Aurelia CLI, but they should work fine with Webpack.
First, I can understand if this post gets shutdown due to its subjective nature.
I believe it's time to re-visit the answers about Aurelia CLI being a second-class tool. I respect both PW Kad and Ashley Grant immensely, but I am just not convinced that a statement like this is true anymore:
There are many features planned for the Aurelia CLI but given at the
time of writing this that it is in an alpha / beta state it should
generally be used on proof of concept or other smaller apps, not
production-ready large scale apps yet.
Notably, I have a production application that way back in the day I started with Aurelia CLI, and changed it to JSPM precisely for the reasons noted. But recently, I rebuilt the same app from scratch using the CLI and I realize that it is much easier to use, particularly managing modules and publishing! And this is an app with Google Maps, Google Analytics, Auth0, DevExpress, Bootstrap, etc.
Just think it is time to give Aurelia CLI a little love. It's ready.
Aurelia CLI is the most preferred option with this announcement.
http://aurelia.io/blog/2017/08/18/aurelia-cli-webpack-update/
Now It has more flexibility for your choice of preferences.
I have an online site and Im going to overhaul it. While I cannot find any information about if I can use npm and some kind of package manager (e.g Webpack) on live site which is on shared host (which has latest Node.js, npm support etc), Im going to develope it locally and worry about "publishing" it later on.
Is there a way to somehow covert my current downloaded project to npm project or Im better off just starting a new project? This is rather confusing, I've never used npm before.
Im using WordPress, everything is run with PHP atm but Im going to overhaul it and use Node.js.
NPM can be used to collect and manage Javascript dependencies for the browser so as to create a stand alone front-end JS app. BUT, bower is probably a better choice.
NPM is designed to manage Javascript dependencies for projects that use NodeJS or use the CommonJS module format for requiring modules.
Bower is specifically a package manager (like npm or composer) but it is meant to manage browser based javascript dependencies.
Currently, javascript doesn't have a formally defined module/import system, so a number of competing require() functions are been produced. NodeJS comes with a require() function that searches the npm/ folder for modules. Browserify is a pre-processor that can scan the npm folder for a dependency and all of its dependencies and bundle them into 1 file for a browser to download (because browser's don't have a require() function because the JS standard doesn't have define one)
I might be rambling here, but you should probably look at bower, and then - at some point in the future - look at either browserify or requirejs to combine and optimize all the JS plugins for your front-end app.
Edit for clarity:
Basically there are 2 engines to run your JS application: the browser or NodeJS. NodeJS needs npm, the browser has no idea what npm is. If you want to write a clean, single page app, all JS front-end for a PHP backend, you don't need NodeJS, and therefore don't need npm. Using npm will prematurely complicate the development of a front-end browser app because it will force you to decide on a require() implementation (Browserify or Requirejs) right from the start.