Chapter 1: Why Dart Needs a Spring Boot

Dart is an incredible language for backend development — but building enterprise APIs in Dart has always meant reinventing the wheel. No standard dependency injection. No annotation-driven configuration. No Spring Boot equivalent. In this first chapter, we explore why Dart deserves a framework like Spring Boot, introduce JetLeaf's layered architecture, and preview the TaskFlow project we'll build across 15 episodes. Plus: Engineering Diary — why I started this project, and the 4,000 lines I deleted to get here.