Google announced the release of DartBox 2D, a Dart port for Box2D, the 2D physics engine for games.
Dart, for the uninitiated, is a web programming language Google developed, and revealed last year at the GOTO conference. “At Google we’ve written our share of web apps, and we’ve tried in many ways to make improvements to that development process, short of introducing a new language,” Google says on the official Dart site. “Now we think it’s time to take that leap. We designed Dart to be easy to write development tools for, well-suited to modern app development, and capable of high-performance implementations.”
DartBox2D is actually the result of Google’s “20% time” culture.
“Box2D has been ported to other languages, including JavaScript, but this release opens the door to Dart becoming a language for games on the web, which, as we all know, is what the web is really for (that and pictures of cats, of course). The work was started by two interns at Google, Greg Bigelow and Ahmed Hussein, continued by Joel Webber, and finished up by Dominic Hamon,” says Hamon, part of Google’s “Make the Web Faster” team.
“DartBox2D is a straight port from the Java version and isn’t yet using all of the great features the Dart developers have built into Dart, but moving forward it will become a template for how to write great Dart code,” he adds. “The ease with which this port was developed speaks to the great job the Dart team have done with the language.”
So far they’ve created the following demos:
BallCage
Bench2D
BlobTest
CircleStress
DominoTest
DominoTower
A Google Group has been created for discussion of Dartbox2D.