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Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

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Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#281
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do android development, Kotlin. If you want to do multi platform development, flutter. I think flutter will be an amazing tool for smaller teams, especially in non-tech-primary organisations. I work in the public sector of Denmark, we do in-house development, our main focus is the public services we provide though. So there is just no way we can do mobile, desktop and web without something like Flutter…

Why not React / React Native?

If i understood it correctly, React Native basically gives you a JS runtime environment that handles communication with native APIs of the system and is shipped with your app. Flutter (and Dart) will transpile into native code and compile natively for your platform.

So on React Native you will have that abstraction layer add runtime latency and package size of your app, while Flutter (Dart) really outputs native code.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#282

Can someone from the Google team comment on what's going on - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/kotlin-is-now-googles-pref... > Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/google-launches-jetpack-co... > Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use…

And you think that anybody can answer that from Google? There are different factions in every company, they are fighting over things constantly. This is why Google has many similar products.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#283
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do android development, Kotlin. If you want to do multi platform development, flutter. I think flutter will be an amazing tool for smaller teams, especially in non-tech-primary organisations. I work in the public sector of Denmark, we do in-house development, our main focus is the public services we provide though. So there is just no way we can do mobile, desktop and web without something like Flutter…

Why not React / React Native?

React Native has a JavaScript layer that hurts performance and it is not truly native as they say. Just do a reach on flutter vs react native and you'll see better explanations and comparisons.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#284

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

I tested it, and the "Hello, World" example results in a 560k js package. Uglified and minified takes it down to around 480k. Gzip takes that to 140k and Brotli compression to 100k. That's a lot to bootstrap an app with, but it's not unreasonable, considering what most frameworks these days will start you with.

I think the "fix" is not to accept the state of play but to challenge it.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#285
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For embedded devices the only good toolkit is Qt and the licensing costs are pretty high. Flutter for embedded is interesting in this regard.

Gluon, PTC and Aicas also license JavaFX. Qt licensing costs are quite standard to market prices of similar products. Also if one doesn't want to pay for Qt, it is free to do themselves the same they want to do with upstream developers.

JavaFX is fully open source, it doesn't need licensing. It also supports hardware acceleration, embedded usage on Linux, animation framework etc. Also, fits well with kotlin.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is, the same people complaining about 500kb are probably the same people using a 100MB+ terminal emulator built using a web browser (i.e. hyper).

You don't download the entire app every time you change directories like you do navigating between sites in a browser.

If you're sending JavaScript down the line with every request, you're doing it wrong and should give up your career.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#287

This is the example flutter app for the web - https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste, right clicking causes things to happen. I don't expect games like this to have links and proper bookmarkable urls, but I doubt it'll work as expected if it did. This is the epitome of the problem with flutter - it re-implements the UI, creat…

I’m not convinced that Flutter needs to beat native to survive- it just needs to be better than React Native, Xamarin, and PWAs.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#288

Does anyone know how the server-side story is? Is there a CRUD-heaven like Django or Rails for Dart which can share the types with a Flutter client? IMHO Google should focus on that too, if not. I passionately hate re-typing same REST-entities over and over again, and that's one of the reasons why I love TypeScript.

In case you are not looking for a one-stop-framework, there are small libraries that do bits and pieces of the stack, and besides thosakwe's angel framework, there is also aqueduct (https://aqueduct.io/), which is also a full-fledged framework.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#289
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of businesses are desperate for cross platform mobile dev (I'm not looking at you ), it seems to be an inevitability at this point. In the meantime React Native has come along and I don't think it's made a good name for itself in the mobile dev world. RN projects get littered with poorly implemented third party libraries that aim to bridge a piece of native functionality or SDK into the react context. I've just…

Agree with this. React Native development is just a horrible overall experience. The ecosystem is fragmented in so many ways with so many strange third party dependencies. It seems as if there is no 'best practice' yet. Its performance and resource usage hasn't been great either, compared to native. After messing with it for a couple of months, I would much, much rather duplicate my work with native Swift and Java/Ko…

You can actually use Kotlin on iOS, look at the jetbrains samples for Kotlin/Native. You still need to use the iOS frameworks of course but all the genuinely OS independent code can be shared.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, encrypting before compressing seems like a pretty strange decision. How does that happen?

I believe the literature says that compress before encrypt is less secure, because compression behaves predictably. See CRIME attacks.

But, why compress at all then? It won't do anything.

I'm not sure this is a good enough reason to never compress anything.

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