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Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#21

Post by eklavya »

ma2rten wrote: post #7
everdev wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm evaluating it. Why do you think it's the future? What's the feature you value most?

I tried both Flutter and ReactNative. I am not an expert, so take it with a grain of salt, but here is my first impression: I would say the best part about it is the hot reload, which maintains application state. It's compiled to native code so it's going to run faster than ReactNative which is a javascript bundle that runs besides your app. Compile times are fast, but not instantaneous and you have to trigger the re…

You don’t have to reload manually. Reloads automatically, make sure you have turned on reload on save in vs code or something similar in IntelliJ.

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#22

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

The title is a bit of an oxymoron; aren't production-ready and beta mutually exclusive in most cases? The examples they showcase seem like pretty small and simple apps. The musical one seems like it could've easily been a web app, since it's just displaying information.

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#23

Post by ma2rten »

eklavya wrote: post #21
ma2rten wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried both Flutter and ReactNative. I am not an expert, so take it with a grain of salt, but here is my first impression: I would say the best part about it is the hot reload, which maintains application state. It's compiled to native code so it's going to run faster than ReactNative which is a javascript bundle that runs besides your app. Compile times are fast, but not instantaneous and you have to trigger the re…

You don’t have to reload manually. Reloads automatically, make sure you have turned on reload on save in vs code or something similar in IntelliJ.

I see. I am using vim + commandline.

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#24

Post by isuckatcoding »

hazz99 wrote: post #15

A few months ago, I began using Flutter for a sideproject (That I wanted to release). Although the developer experience is absolute fantastic (And definitely the future), the plugin ecosystem is extremely lacking. I wanted to use AWS, and there was 0 backing for it. Since I didn't want to interact with raw AWS APIs, I moved to React Native.

It looks like you could "wrap" native libraries using custom packages: https://flutter.io/developing-packages/#plugin.

I'm curious which AWS APIs you'd want to connect your mobile app directly to. S3/ SQS?

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#25

Post by malkia »

quangio wrote: post #11
grigy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being agree with all 4 points I see two drawbacks: 1. Not using OEM widgets. Even the rendered widgets may look good, they can't beat the native widgets optimized for the particular platform. 2. The choice of Dart as the main language. I can understand both points though

I don't think using non-OEM widgets is a bad thing because it's not like Electron; Flutter uses Skia to render widgets, and it's fast. There is an article https://medium.com/flutter-io/why-flutter-doesnt-use-oem-wid...

I love Flutter, and how it looks, but while I was at the Google I/O Extended I was given an Android Things Kit. That specific version of the kit did not had GPU, and later (at home) when I tried Flutter - it was running very slow, while other android apps were manageable.

Then again, this is more of an outlier (today) with the GPU present almost on any mobile device, but still something to know about (e.g. flutter won't be of good use there).

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#26

Post by foepys »

quangio wrote: post #11
grigy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being agree with all 4 points I see two drawbacks: 1. Not using OEM widgets. Even the rendered widgets may look good, they can't beat the native widgets optimized for the particular platform. 2. The choice of Dart as the main language. I can understand both points though

I don't think using non-OEM widgets is a bad thing because it's not like Electron; Flutter uses Skia to render widgets, and it's fast. There is an article https://medium.com/flutter-io/why-flutter-doesnt-use-oem-wid...

I'm always concerned that accessibility is being left behind. Android and iOS both put great efforts into making their UI accessible, why do the work again? Chances are that the accessibility of those third-party components will be worse or maybe doesn't even work at all.

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#27

Post by nevi-me »

I like the direction that Flutter has taken, cross-platform without the baggage of being a web platform.

If you know JS and Java, Dart is very easy to learn. About a few hours' worth of tinkering and you'll be good.

I had an Android app [0] that I was trying to build with Kotlin in the evenings/weekends. I switched to Flutter, and was able to get something out of the door in less than the time I spent on Kotlin/Java.

I like the mix between Flutter and being able to call native APIs. The only thing I'm missing right now is good maps support. Google and Mapbox have some prototypes, but it's still too early to use them (for what I want to do).

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=za.co.movingga...

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#28

Post by nevi-me »

falcon620 wrote: post #14

I keep checking up on issue 730 once in a while: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/730 Nope. Still no inline webview component.

That reminds me of MongoDB's infamous issues that remained open for years. They became the subject of many blog posts and discussions.

I still remember SERVER-1243 so well because of how much I saw it. They eventually fixed/closed it last year, after 7 years.

My main missing features on Flutter are:

* background execution * Google maps parity with Android/iOS

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1243

Re: Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

#29

Post by egeozcan »

foepys wrote: post #26
quangio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think using non-OEM widgets is a bad thing because it's not like Electron; Flutter uses Skia to render widgets, and it's fast. There is an article https://medium.com/flutter-io/why-flutter-doesnt-use-oem-wid...

I'm always concerned that accessibility is being left behind. Android and iOS both put great efforts into making their UI accessible, why do the work again? Chances are that the accessibility of those third-party components will be worse or maybe doesn't even work at all.

The problem is that the accessibility work already needs to be done on every platform (for now we have two really popular ones but nobody can be sure what the future brings).

Also, if you could just recompile your app for a new platform and release (more or less), it would remove the biggest barrier to entry for possible new platforms: Adoption.

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