Flutter looks good, but is painful

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #115

pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way that Dropbox, Microsoft and plenty of other companies do. You use a JNI generator and follow the so called hamburger architecture. Microsoft and Dropbox have several sessions done at CppCon.

You're going to have to provide a link because "hamburger architecture" returns no relevant search results and I still don't know how you mean to make an Android GUI in C++. Unless you mean you write your core logic in C++ and your GUI with Java and link them via JNI? That still means you have to write the GUI again for every platform, and you still have to use the Android API which is a very awkward system to make G…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

solarexplorer wrote: post #97

pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An UI without logic is an useless app.

Often you can offload the business logic to the backend. That way you don’t have to implement it multiple times for each platform and you can change it “immediately” even if users don’t update their apps.

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #93

iainmerrick wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people overestimate how complex it is to build multiple native apps in parallel. I agree, although there are now more platforms to deal with than back in the days when it was just Mac and Windows: add iOS, Android, desktop web, mobile web. I think it also helps when it's easy to share code between platforms, which again, used to be easier when you were just targeting the desktop (just use C or C++). Now it's a bit ha…

I remember the days of Apple II, TSR-80, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum 128K, ZX Spectrum 128K +2A, ZX Spectrum 128K +3A, Atari, Atari ST, Amiga 500, Amiga 600, Amiga 1200, PC CGA, PC EGA, PC VGA, PC PS2,..... Platform fragmentation exists since ever.

Post by rkangel » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #112

jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

It depends what you mean by “re-writing the same app”. In general you can have the core features written in C++, thus available everywhere, then write a platform specific layer on top of this. That’s a quite common approach, and if done correctly (that’s not a trivial task though) allow you to target any platform without too much effort. But yes, you still have to maintain a bunch of stuff for each platform: - implem…

Post by mamcx » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have univ…

    UI derived from BaseUI..

    //customize it for my project or create a new platform

    UI.register(UIButton...
    UI.register(UIWindow for "Window"
    //Attach listeners..
    UI.listen(...)
    //Run the UI
    UI.run(the UI directory)