The original version of this article was published nearly 5 years ago. The options have changed quite a bit since then. This is a full update for February 2024. I’ve been meaning to write this update for a while, but was recently reminded again when I read Dart on the Server: Exploring Server-Side Dart Technologies in 2024. Read that post as well.
If it weren’t for Flutter, I wouldn’t even have considered server-side Dart. But the same thing that made me choose Flutter, also caused me to pursue building the backend with Dart.
I eagerly embraced Flutter because it took so much time to build two separate apps for Android and iOS. How wonderful to just have just one code base for both! That ability subsequently expanded to include the desktop and web. If you can use Dart to build any kind of frontend app, why not use it on the backend as well?
It’s not so much that you can share the code; the backend and frontend have different tasks after all. It’s more that you can share the language itself. With mobile development in the past, I was always switching between Java and Swift and muddling through Kotlin and Objective-C. Adding the backend meant adding yet another language, some of the more popular frameworks at the time…
