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Flutter Release Preview 2

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Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#91

Post by Apocryphon »

pjmlp wrote: post #87
pier25 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has abandoned products, but has it abandoned technologies?

Every year at Google IO Android APIs get partially rebooted, the NDK already got three build systems, Android Studio is being rebuilt from version to version. Good luck to those that jump today into Android without the background how it grew up since the early days. Documentation is outdated and many of the still documented best practices have long been replaced by Medium posts and SO answers about the new best pract…

Android development resembles web development?

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#92

Post by pjmlp »

Apocryphon wrote: post #91
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year at Google IO Android APIs get partially rebooted, the NDK already got three build systems, Android Studio is being rebuilt from version to version. Good luck to those that jump today into Android without the background how it grew up since the early days. Documentation is outdated and many of the still documented best practices have long been replaced by Medium posts and SO answers about the new best pract…

Android development resembles web development?

Yes, but they still manage to be more pleasant to work with than building UIs with and CSS, while making it work across any device with something that resembles a browser on them.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#93

Post by pjmlp »

Apocryphon wrote: post #90
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Flutter is actually endorsed by the Android team I wouldn't even bother. PWAs are being pushed by the Chrome team and Microsoft, which I have more faith than on Dart/Flutter, specially as skills to sell. Likewise for C++ with native views, Qt or Xamarin. What I care about is using a language where Flutter is the last hope to make it relevant in the market. I don't need another one to pile on my Turbo Pascal, Ob…

There's always another bridge: https://tech.olx.com/fast-prototypes-with-flutter-kotlin-nat...

Thanks, to me it looks more attrition than the solutions I listed.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#94

Post by FlyingSnake »

eseidelGoogle wrote: post #72
FlyingSnake wrote: post #64

Flutter might be a cool project, but what's the status of integrating native controls? Mobile apps are not only CRUD clients and do lots of stuff that needs tight OS integration. The last time I checked, flutter couldn't do Maps, GeoLocations, AR (ArKit/ARCore), Encryption, audio/video, file storage etc activities that are outside the normal purview of a CRUD TableView App. Since flutter team seems to be active here,…

(Disclosure: I'm the Eng. Mgr for the Flutter project at Google.) In general Flutter takes the position that Flutter should not limit your choices and your apps should be able to do anything the phone can do. Flutter apps are just iOS or Android apps, you can always open up the ios or android sub-folders and write as much Obj-C/Swift or Java/Kotlin code as you like. Flutter's core engine/framework are all about provi…

Thanks for response, I have high hopes from Flutter, however having spend years in cross-platform mobile development, I just want to avoid the most common pitfalls. I hope this comment doesn't come out as snarky, I just wanted to give an honest opinion.

Not having first-class Maps is a deal breaker for many apps, and having only Google Maps support is not what most developers want. I would like to port my current app, but without proper maps support Flutter feels like a cousin of Ionic.

What's the FFI story of Flutter? Could you please point me to the direction of using ARkit view using ObjC/Java FFI? From what I've seen we've to wire an OpenGL View to achieve AR capabilities, but I might be wrong.

While the crypto package is a good start, I was more interested in having access to the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on iOS/Android. Do you have any work being done in that area? Lots of apps (e.g. Fintech) have security audits and these things could be a deal breaker.

A cursory look the Audio plugins show that it's a wrapper around AVFoundation etc. and they are capable of playing audio/video, I would love to see an official plugin with 1-to-1 feature parity with iOS/Android AV API.

Flutter is a great project, but it seems to be plagued by the same issues that React Native, and Xamarin has.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#95

Post by devxpy »

MarkMc wrote: post #33

I first started developing with Flutter about a year ago. One thing that has really impressed me is how responsive the Flutter team is to developers. Often when I posted a question on Stack Overflow it would be answered perfectly within 24 hours by a member of the Flutter team. Contrast this with React Native where Facebook's attitude seems to be to develop what they need themselves then 'throw it over the wall' to f…

Damn right.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#96

Post by hillelcoren »

Another big fan of Flutter here...

We're using it to replace our native iOS and Android apps enabling us to have a single code base. This is critical for a team as small as ours (2 devs covering web and mobile).

I can't sing its praises strongly enough, you can check out the code for our app here:

https://github.com/invoiceninja/flutter-mobile/

Edit: grammar is hard

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#97

Post by stewbrew »

filiph wrote: post #71
stewbrew wrote: post #54

Why do they want me to learn a new language to make use of a gui runtime+lib? Seriously. What makes that language that revolutionary so that nothing else, no other tried & tested & loathed language, could have been used instead? I don't see it.

We get this a lot. To the point that my colleague wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf It's not easy to explain in a HN comment. Technical decisions like these never are. In this particular case, there is no single "Dart can do X and nothing else can". That's not true for any feature. It's the combination that mattered. All in all, Dart was a really, really, really good choice. Not fr…

So, the argument basically boils down to: It's a bad thing to use a dsl or similar only for gui. It's a good thing to use a whole new language you have to port all your code to and that has only a small ecosystem so you can also write all these libraries yourself.

Don't get me wrong. Flutter may well be a formidable piece of software. Dart either. I just don't get how flutter is marketed around the fact that dart was there first with no convincing use case and that people only then started looking for a raison d'etre.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#98

Post by sebe »

stewbrew wrote: post #97
filiph wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get this a lot. To the point that my colleague wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf It's not easy to explain in a HN comment. Technical decisions like these never are. In this particular case, there is no single "Dart can do X and nothing else can". That's not true for any feature. It's the combination that mattered. All in all, Dart was a really, really, really good choice. Not fr…

So, the argument basically boils down to: It's a bad thing to use a dsl or similar only for gui. It's a good thing to use a whole new language you have to port all your code to and that has only a small ecosystem so you can also write all these libraries yourself. Don't get me wrong. Flutter may well be a formidable piece of software. Dart either. I just don't get how flutter is marketed around the fact that dart was…

Hey I've been following Dartlang's up and downs over the years, here are some ramblings about Flutter.

When the chrome guys started the Sky experiment, now the flutter project, they started with javascript. I don't know why they dropped javascript, but they looked at several languages before trying Dart. Here is a floss weekly episode with one of the co-founders, talks about flutter's hotreload, an idea that came from the Dart team.

https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s

If swift was opensource back then they may have gone with it and if they started today they may have gone with kotlin native.

Flutter's hotreload feature, something that they didn't know they wanted, was created after they decided to give Dart a go. While the Dart team had missed the boat on getting the Dart VM into chrome, they still had their internal customers using Dart2JS. The Dart team also had their own experiments in IOT and running on IOS.

Maybe Sky/Flutter guys saw Dart solving their problems that Javascript couldn't and they also saw that the Dart team has the expertise to help them in advancing their experiment to where it is today.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#99

Post by village-idiot »

riku_iki wrote: post #39
village-idiot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a marketing perspective, that was an awful choice. Releasing an effectively unrelated product and calling it 2.0 is just asking for trouble. Second, they immediately announced no migration path and no more bug fixes at the same time. I’m not sure if they stuck with that, I was in the backbone camp at that time, but that is a painful pill to swallow. That they made that call without considering the downstream pai…

> and no more bug fixes Angular 2 was released in Sep 2016. AngularJS continued releases up until Jul 2018, with 3 years of security fixes after that. 5 years is plenty of time to rewrite your app.

Either they backed down, or my memory is faulty. I recall at the time the announcement was that they were doing a hard cutover support wise. But since I wasn’t developing in Angular it was more of an interesting thing and not an immediate concern.

You’re right, 5 years is plenty of time.

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