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Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

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Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#41

Post by tracker1 »

betoharres wrote: post #33

just learn WebAssembly, it's the future :o

It's not a matter of "just learn WebAssembly", nobody (with some exceptions to those working on tooling) is going to learn raw WebAssembly, it just won't happen.

I would suggest that Blazor (C#) and Yew (Rust) are probably two of the most usable frameworks currently. There are some commercial libraries for Blazor and even some open source, but more is needed. There are ongoing and breaking changes that will be painful if you start adopting now.

Beyond all of this, is the fact that you still are interacting with the DOM via a transport layer that will generally not be great for a lot of use cases, you might do well with a canvas and animation frame events, but that won't have good accessibility.

Even then we're talking about native applications for portable devices, which likely won't see a good WASM story for a few years and in the case of Apple, if ever.

I'm not saying that WASM isn't cool... it really is, and you can do some very cool things with it as a target both browser and in dedicated runtimes... it's just not ready/baked for application targets (yet), and you shouldn't be betting a startup, or long-lived application on it just yet.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#42

Post by Benjammer »

This is super interesting, but the problem I have is that this guy's eye for design leaves a lot to be desired. When was the last time someone built a clunky table directly into the UI and added fully styled table rows dynamically? Why not modernize the design, and use a styled list view with a data adapter and try this again on each platform? It didn't surprise me at all that he struggled with the table in basically every scenario. There's a reason (or two) they've fallen out of fashion, imo, and it sort of clouded the assessment of everything for me, since he kept mentioning struggling with the table.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#43

Post by dickjocke »

jpincheira wrote: post #29

If you’re a small startup, just like we are doing at ours [1], you want to share as much code as possible between your web and mobile apps, and also backend, so sadly due to Dart, I don’t see us anywhere in the future using Flutter. [1] https://standups.io

Can you really straight up share components between react and react-native? Most of the RN components kinda map to mobile stuff--they're called things like View and TextInput. Most of what I see in React are divs with different stylings.

Moreover, can you share any code at all between node.js and react/RN?

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#44

Post by jpincheira »

markdog12 wrote: post #40
jpincheira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for web? We're using react, and are planning to move to react-native-web for better web + mobile code sharing, and for Catalyst for having a native macOS app — not sure also if Flutter will work for that. But it's key for us, since we started with JS, to stay in JS due to the knowledge out there and within our team — already. It, of course, depends on your team and in your hiring options. I feel Fl…

Dart on the web frontend too, since start of the project. If you already had a substantial part of the project in JS, then Typescript would prob be better choice. Dart is pretty mature at this point, with a very solid type system and getting better with extension methods just added and NNBD coming soon. It doesn't have as many packages, but it's pretty good. > native macOS app — not sure also if Flutter will work for…

To me "not enough packages" out there means it's an instant competitive disadvantage to do production-ready apps, at least for Web — which at for us at Standups is a critical platform, especially given we're B2B.

Hopefully, it catches up soon though, as I do think Flutter is better than React Native in most fronts.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#45

Post by dickjocke »

siquick wrote: post #30
braindongle wrote: post #28

Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.

> Lower dev resources Learning a completely new language in Dart to even get started with Flutter doesn't seem like low dev resources. With React Native you are using: - Javascript which most devs have a grasp on in 2020 - JSX which really isn't much different to HTML - Styling is practically just CSS with slightly different property formatting and naming If you've decided to go down the RN then theres a decent chanc…

Learning Flutter is really easy. I know everyone says it, but I encourage everyone to spend one Saturday trying to build some toy app with a single Google Maps screen or something. I fought with React Native for so long because it's dominant but I don't think I can ever go back. I never found myself getting truly comfortable with it or feeling like it did what I expected.

Im a backend dev so I really love that flutter will handle so much of the positioning of widgets/components on the screen AND give me a decent styling out the box and I only have to intervene if I want to. Thinking back to Grids and Flexbox makes my skin crawl lol.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#46

Post by dickjocke »

redsolver wrote: post #19
thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

I personally use Dart for almost every task. Frontend - Flutter for the UI (Android, iOS and Web) Backend REST Services - Pure Dart or Aqueduct.io for more complex apps Scripting on my PC Command Line Interfaces for different Tools Advent of Code solutions Blockchain stuff Chat bots ... much more So why do I like Dart? The default libraries are amazing - dart:convert, dart:io and more. The asynchronous language featu…

I really like Flutter, infact it's the first language I've been really excited about since Python back in college, but I worry about learning something like Aqueduct.io. I feel like the biggest con with Flutter is that there are not that many resources relative to React Native, i fear the server frameworks would be even worse.

Definitely gonna try flutter for web though--im ready to say goodbye to React completely.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#47

Post by bananabreakfast »

siquick wrote: post #30
braindongle wrote: post #28

Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.

> Lower dev resources Learning a completely new language in Dart to even get started with Flutter doesn't seem like low dev resources. With React Native you are using: - Javascript which most devs have a grasp on in 2020 - JSX which really isn't much different to HTML - Styling is practically just CSS with slightly different property formatting and naming If you've decided to go down the RN then theres a decent chanc…

Learning Dart is definitely not a large dev hurdle.

Most people (esp. js devs) can read dart and understand what it is doing without ever having even seen the code before.

I've found it takes an experienced engineer about two weeks to learn enough Go to be productive and Dart is honestly easier than that.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#48

Post by dickjocke »

jrs95 wrote: post #25

I've been considering trying out Flutter, but mainly due to my frustrations with React Native and I'm not entirely sure if others have had similar experiences or if Flutter would be any better. I have all kinds of issues with React Native tooling stability: code randomly reverts back to previous versions with hot reloading, things only partially update when I make changes, the same styles sometimes have inconsistent…

Please, please try Flutter. I had literally the same issues with React Native and gave Flutter a test run late last year. I will never go back. Flutter is so stable and honestly my frustrations with Flex made consider giving up on mobile development. I think as a backend dev i really struggle with the layout aspects of mobile dev and flutter makes it so easy for me.

I'd say spend two nights playing with flutter. It took me that long to feel comfortable with Flutter's version of Components and state, but now it's a breeze. Hot reloading works great, it's easy to plug in native code if you need it, it's just amazing. I haven't been this excited about a language in years.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#49

Post by bweitzman »

arciini wrote: post #4

I think building a toy app for yourself is among the best ways to decide for yourself which framework to go with! The conclusions from the article were: > Creating the Flutter application only took approximately ⅓ of the time it took to create both native applications combined. This proves how much time you save by using cross-platform frameworks. Their Hot Reload functionality also sped up the development cycle a lo…

I tried writing a small app using Flutter. It was really a fantastic experience IMO.

To answer some of your questions:

1. Long lists are pretty painless to implement. There a some helper views included for building list views that aren't backed by in memory lists, and they feel really nice and fluid (https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/ListView/ListView.bu...)

2. Flutter has lots of built in animation support. Almost every aspect of a view is animatable out of the box (see https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/AnimatedContainer-cl... for an example). I definitely got carried away with the animations because of how fun and easy they were!

3. I had to deal with native code for push notifications, sharing flows, and universal links. Google publishes libraries for dealing with a lot of the common stuff, and there's great community support as well.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#50

Post by dickjocke »

markdog12 wrote: post #15
thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

We've been using Dart for years on a successful web app, front-end, back-end, and tooling. It's simple to learn. We've had devs experienced in C++ contributing to the codebase in a couple of days without any prior exposure. It's a great general purpose language, and with recent addition of extension methods and NNBD coming soon, it's getting even better. Ecosystem isn't as extensive as JS world, but it's pretty good.…

I discovered Flutter recently and love it! I want to buy in all the way. Could you go more into your experiences, especially with backend and tooling? I'm pretty sold on it for web dev, as I spent a ton of time trying to get into react/react native and am ready to move one. I guess my main concern is support for libraries. I don't recall seeing Dart libraries for most GCP/AWS services. And what about all of the bajillion clients and neat stuff that has already been written for say Python. I feel like it's a tough pill to swallow to say goodbye to that stuff.
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