Full-service Flutter consulting firm Very Good Ventures today announced the release of Dart Frog 1.0, a fully stable open-source backend framework for Dart designed to make sharing tooling, models and more across the entire stack a reality for developers.

Dart itself is an open-source programming language developed by Google optimized for client-side operations across multiple platforms, such as mobile, web and desktop. In combination with the app user interface development toolkit Flutter, it can be used to develop native applications that can run across multiple platforms without needing to change a single line of code.

Speaking to SiliconANGLE in an email, Very Good Ventures Senior Open Source Engineer Renan Araújo and Tech Delivery Lead Erick Zanardo said that with Dart Frog 1.0, developers can write code that can be used on the client side and the server side without needing to switch languages and opens up the backend to all the benefits of using Dart.

“Dart Frog, as most of our open-source projects, came out of a visible and recurrent need on some of our client projects,” Araújo explained. “Since the early days of Flutter, people have been talking about the need of a Dart back-end framework.”

Building on the success of Flutter, which was thanks to its simplicity of use and development experience, Dart Frog provides a better back-end experience by allowing developers to use Dart to as their back-end language for logic.

Being able to use the same language between front end and the back end can be a timesaver for developers because it takes a lot of burden off both their skill use and the logic itself. It allows them to share logic between both client and server, which allows the user interface to normalize data and predict actions. It also permits developers to streamline content integration and delivery because it allows them to reuse signal logic written for the client on the back end and vice versa, which can save time and energy.

“Language is just a detail when thinking in different types of development, like front-end and back-end,” said Zanardo. “But having the same language makes it easier for developers to transit between different stacks, allowing better use of development time.”

Dart Frog 1.0 ships with new features including a Dart Frog daemon, which allows better integration with third-party systems and plugins, file uploads, wildcard routes and authentication support. It also has a Visual Studio Code extension for developers to add it to their coding tools. Finally, there’s the ability to upgrade to Dart 3, which Google announced in May.

This news follows Very Good Ventures closing an expanded Series A round with $3.4 million led by Celesta Capital for a total raise of $6.6 million. The company has been expanding its footprint and funding also with the acquisition of CreateThrive, a mobile and web development firm with significant Flutter expertise within the Latin American market.

As for the future of Dart Frog, the 1.0 release marks the beginning of a long roadmap that will include numerous improvements including a more pragmatic way to approach web calls and plans to generate a Dart Client package out of any Dart Frog project.

“The developer experience is also a continued focus, including several additions to our new VSCode extension, created with the goal to make building a robust, fast and enterprise-grade Dart backend as joyful as building a Flutter app — from start to finish,” Araújo said.

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