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Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

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Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#41

Post by dillonnys »

firecall wrote: post #40

Question for OP: Obviously you are committed to Flutter and Dart. Where do you see it going, broadly? I’ve used Flutter a small amount and enjoyed it. But it’s a hard sell to commit fully to it. The alternatives of native tooling on iOS, Android and the web are not contentious choices. Whereas suggesting to a team or decision maker that Flutter is the right choice seems like it could be an uphill battle! As a solo de…

These are reasonable concerns.

Having seen the development of Flutter and its ecosystem over the past 7 years, I've come to really believe in the framework and its mission. There have been lots of companies which have found success building with Flutter [1] and it very often speaks to their bottom lines [2].

I'm hopeful for its continued success, but more importantly, I believe that having more companies building enterprise solutions makes the technology more attractive and practical to adopt. The founder of Flutter has started Shorebird [3] and the FlutterFlow team recently closed a $25M Series A [4]. These are great investments to have into Flutter.

Another cool stat: Dart was the fastest growing programming language among all languages last year at 33%! [5]

All that to say, I believe the business value of Flutter is becoming clear and I think having more companies building on top will reduce adoption risk and create a very rich ecosystem for further progress.

[1] https://flutter.dev/showcase

[2] https://assets-global.website-files.com/5ee12d8e99cde2e20255...

[3] https://shorebird.dev/

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/flutterflow-attracts-cash-...

[5] https://www.developernation.net/resources/reports/state-of-t...

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#42

Post by marcglasberg »

firecall wrote: post #40

Question for OP: Obviously you are committed to Flutter and Dart. Where do you see it going, broadly? I’ve used Flutter a small amount and enjoyed it. But it’s a hard sell to commit fully to it. The alternatives of native tooling on iOS, Android and the web are not contentious choices. Whereas suggesting to a team or decision maker that Flutter is the right choice seems like it could be an uphill battle! As a solo de…

Flutter tooling is superior to that of native iOS and Android development. It's not just about the cost savings from avoiding separate builds: Developing a Flutter app is generally easier than developing a separate app for either Android or iOS. And the developer experience is way better too.

Google is not killing Flutter. Despite Google's rep, Flutter is a highly successful project that Google uses for many of its own products, including Google Pay, Google Classroom, and Google Ads. It's also used by other major companies: https://flutter.dev/showcase.

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#43

Post by nox101 »

dillonnys wrote: post #41
firecall wrote: post #40

Question for OP: Obviously you are committed to Flutter and Dart. Where do you see it going, broadly? I’ve used Flutter a small amount and enjoyed it. But it’s a hard sell to commit fully to it. The alternatives of native tooling on iOS, Android and the web are not contentious choices. Whereas suggesting to a team or decision maker that Flutter is the right choice seems like it could be an uphill battle! As a solo de…

These are reasonable concerns. Having seen the development of Flutter and its ecosystem over the past 7 years, I've come to really believe in the framework and its mission. There have been lots of companies which have found success building with Flutter [1] and it very often speaks to their bottom lines [2]. I'm hopeful for its continued success, but more importantly, I believe that having more companies building ent…

When I go to flutter examples and go to the first one

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/

I find everything is rendered in a canvas. This means it's not accessibility friendly. It means none of my extensions work. It means no text can be selected (for example clicking the 3rd icon from the top left labeled "Typography". It also means none of the Browser/OS level features are available. I can't select a word and pick "look up" or "define" or "speak". It's shows ugly monochrome non native emoji. It takes second to show non-English characters while it downloads non-English fonts

How is this a win for the user?

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#44

Post by [deleted] »

dillonnys wrote: post #19
e12e wrote: post #17

Looks interesting. What are your plans for the backend - will self-hosting be an option? Right now this looks fine for a hobby project, but massive lock-in/risk for production (what if you shut down, get bought up etc?).

Great points. My immediate plan for reducing lock-in is to provide the option to deploy into a cloud account you manage. This has the upside of making your deployed infrastructure independent of Celest and letting you use your cloud credits. Self-hosting is another option I'm considering, but I don't have a good sense yet of what that could look like. Any thoughts? Is spitting out a binary/Dockerfile sufficient to al…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#45

Post by cgrand-net »

nox101 wrote: post #43
dillonnys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are reasonable concerns. Having seen the development of Flutter and its ecosystem over the past 7 years, I've come to really believe in the framework and its mission. There have been lots of companies which have found success building with Flutter [1] and it very often speaks to their bottom lines [2]. I'm hopeful for its continued success, but more importantly, I believe that having more companies building ent…

When I go to flutter examples and go to the first one https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/ I find everything is rendered in a canvas. This means it's not accessibility friendly. It means none of my extensions work. It means no text can be selected (for example clicking the 3rd icon from the top left labeled "Typography". It also means none of the Browser/OS level features are available. I can't sele…

I can’t speak for web but mobile apps written in Flutter are accessible https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali....

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#46

Post by solatic »

I played around with Flutter a couple years ago for a project that required a mobile app, and walked away really impressed with Flutter and Dart. It's a much, much nicer language for building UI in compared to React Native and even the native languages. But the backend story with Dart was very much neglected. I got the feeling that Flutter's main developers at Google were the driving force behind Dart development, and the lack of backend adoption for Dart at Google was causing it to wither on the vine for backend purposes.

Is the ecosystem support improving here? People end up needing libraries for all kinds of backend stuff, not just auth and SQL like you have on your roadmap. What about sending emails, hooking into payment providers / billing, queues/pubsub, observability...? Doesn't this need to exist first, to make building backends in Dart feasible, before building a framework that makes it easier?

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#47

Post by dillonnys »

solatic wrote: post #46

I played around with Flutter a couple years ago for a project that required a mobile app, and walked away really impressed with Flutter and Dart. It's a much, much nicer language for building UI in compared to React Native and even the native languages. But the backend story with Dart was very much neglected. I got the feeling that Flutter's main developers at Google were the driving force behind Dart development, an…

The ecosystem support is improving, and still needs help. I think we can drive both in parallel so that the framework feeds use cases to the ecosystem which then lead to more complex backends. It's hard to put one before the other, but can be a really powerful flywheel.

Although it's not listed on my landing, it is absolutely a goal of Celest to be a funnel for these use cases and partner with the community as we go to fill the gaps.

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#48

Post by cgrand-net »

dillonnys wrote: post #11
mark_l_watson wrote: post #7

That looks cool, reminds me of long ago when I happily used Heroic, even though Celest is very different. Question: I know a few Clojure enthusiasts who really enjoy Clojure+Dart backend. Is Celest compatible for this workflow?

Interesting! I don't know much about using Closure and Dart together. Any projects you could point me to? Sounds like a cool use case.

Hi, ClojureDart co-author here. Join us on #clojuredart of the Clojurians slack, we will help. Can code in `celest/functions` import from lib? We cou

Re: Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

#50

Post by nox101 »

cgrand-net wrote: post #45
nox101 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I go to flutter examples and go to the first one https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/ I find everything is rendered in a canvas. This means it's not accessibility friendly. It means none of my extensions work. It means no text can be selected (for example clicking the 3rd icon from the top left labeled "Typography". It also means none of the Browser/OS level features are available. I can't sele…

I can’t speak for web but mobile apps written in Flutter are accessible https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali... .

I downloaded the flutter sdk abd built a sample app. it had the similar issues to the web app.
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