What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App

Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by gkya on Saturday June 16, 2018 @07:40PM (#17330103)

I really want to get into mobile development, but I have major obstacles with default platform APIs: I don't have a Mac (and cannot afford one ATM), the Android Studio is unusably heavy for my decent laptop, and writing Android apps w/o the studio seems prohibitively difficult. In this situation, Flutter is a liberating force for me. I have recently started learning it, and I can just keep writing my code in Emacs, while running the app on a phone with hot reload, and without my laptop melting. Thanks to whomever created it.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by mwcampbell on Sunday June 17, 2018 @10:22AM (#17332476)

Why do you say writing Android apps without Android Studio is prohibitively difficult? I did it. You just use Gradle from the command line to build the app, and adb to install it on your device to test. I only tested with an emulator when I didn't have a device.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by vorg on Monday June 18, 2018 @05:37PM (#17341877)

You forgot to mention the slow build times when using Gradle. If Android Studio is too heavy for his laptop then Gradle's hardly going to be much lighter.

Unfortunately, even Flutter requires it when building the production-ready Android version of the app. Perhaps it's time Google switched to their own Bazel as the default for building Android apps. As a bonus, the syntax is a lot lighter than Apache Groovy's.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by gkya on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @12:02AM (#17343741)

My CPU is "Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3217U CPU @ 1.80GHz" par lscpu(1), and I have 4Gb RAM. I should not have to struggle running end-user desktop software except inherently-heavy tasks like video editing and similar memory-heavy or very CPU-intensive stuff. And running a text editor, a compiler and a debugger is definitely not so. I'll go as far as saying that most desktop software that I can't run easily is just plain bloatware. Android Studio, definitely checks out.

I don't know Gradle, I'll try when I have free time. I have one project which can be better off as a Java API app (based mostly on Intents). WRT Flutter, I have not experienced any performance problems with it so far; though I haven't built a "production-ready app" yet. But given it'd mostly be a rare task, that'd be bearable.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by gkya on Sunday June 17, 2018 @02:49PM (#17333678)

Some web pages I read make it look like so, and not only, some say directly that it's impractical. But maybe it's my infamiliarity with the ecosystem that makes me think so. If you know of a nice tutorial I'd really appreciate it!

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by seenickcode on Sunday June 17, 2018 @08:55PM (#17335237)

Hey gkya, I'm the author of the post. I basically have been a long time Mac user and now I have a window machine with a VM with Xubuntu where I do all my dev (I only game on windows). When I want to test cross platform I use my wife's Macbook pro. When I develop and maybe don't have enough RAM to use an Android Emulator, I've found running the app on a real device works well actually.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by gkya on Monday June 18, 2018 @08:18AM (#17337635)

Hi, thanks for writing this article, it was a nice read!

WRT Macs, well, I use a Unixy laptop since time immemorial, one way or another (stuff I spent >1yr with: Ubuntu, Arch, FreeBSD, Xubuntu, and finally and currently Debian; in that order), and being quite content with what I have at hand, I'd be reluctant to switch anyways. But AFAIK the App Store is where the money is, so I want to get in to it ASAP.

I'm in a rare situation where I'm a long time amateur/semi-professional programmer, but I study and plan an academical career in humanities. I need to write up a couple apps to help interacting with documents (what's available on mobile is basically sub-par), so I'll code them up anyways, but I'd be glad if I could share them FOSS but also get some amount of money from the app stores. Even a hundred or two hundred dollars a month would help as a serious amount to complement scholarships or loans as I do masters and a PhD. And I'd be ecstatic if I could avoid scholarships or loans! And flutter would render possible writing such cross platform apps and maintaining them while studying, whereas learning, writing and maintaining two codebases, and spending money on premium hardware up front would be a very big obstacle for me, and also unmaintainable in the long run (I can't write a thesis and maintain compatibly two distinct codebases with such diverging paradigms, let aside multiple apps).

So I guess I'll end up in some time with a setup similar to yours, which I think is optimal: use my favourite setup, test on target platforms. A bit like cross-compiling.

edit: grammor

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by everdev on Saturday June 16, 2018 @08:03PM (#17330178)

Google maintains it

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by currysausage on Saturday June 16, 2018 @08:25PM (#17330260)

And Ian Hickson, the guy behind "HTML5", is one of the core contributors.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by gsnedders on Sunday June 17, 2018 @10:12AM (#17332431)

A lot of the core contributors were members of the original Chrome team; Hixie's far from the only Flutter contributor who previously worked on the web for 15+ years.

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Re:What It Was Like to Write a Full-Blown Flutter App by solarkraft on Sunday June 17, 2018 @09:27AM (#17332273)

That's an interesting bit, since I think of modern web stuff as terribly bloated and flutter as pretty clean.

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