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Google Flutter and AWS Lambda for a serverless mobile app
- ec109685 9y ago“React Native reusable components” What did that mean? Downside of flutter is you can’t use any non Flutter UI control easily.
- mephitix 9y agoYeah this is weird. Maybe they meant "React Native-like reusable components". Flutter widgets take inspiration from React Native: "Flutter widgets are built using a modern reactive-style framework which takes inspiration from React Native. " - https://flutter.io/flutter-for-react-native/#built-in-widgets https://flutter.io/flutter-for-react-native/#built-in-widget...
- xrd 9y agoIndeed. It's inspired by react (diffing algorithm to determine what to render) but I saw nothing to indicate it can use react components inside flutter.
- hoodoof 9y agoI became quite interested in Flutter recently but it was pretty much impossible to find a range of good demo applications (or any demo applications) that show off what it is capable of so I gave up. LOTS of technical documentation however but nothing to sell me on using it.
- kyrra 9y agoThe beta announce blogpost for flutter links to 3 apps published that used it[0]. Also, it seems according to that blog post and the Ars[1] post on it, Adwords may be using Flutter? But that doesn't seem clear to me. [0] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/announcing-flutter-beta-1.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/announcing-flutter... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/google-starts-a-push-for-cross-platform-app-development-with-flutter-sdk/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/google-starts-a-push...
- movedx 9y agoI'm currently working on an open-source "wish list" application that will be Serverless with a Flutter based mobile application. I'm vLogging about it at my channel (youtube.com/opsfactory) and will be providing a premium training course going into much, MUCH more details than the YT videos. The course is due in a few months.
- timsneath 9y agoYeah, we've got some work to do to fill out our set of examples. (Disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.) - There's a catalog of simple but official examples in the Flutter repo, under the examples directory: https://github.com/flutter/flutter https://github.com/flutter/flutter - One Flutter user has contributed a pretty impressive list of examples and learning resources here: https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter - One of my personal favorite examples is this restaurant app prototype, which is inspired by an Uplabs design: https://github.com/braulio94/menu_flutter https://github.com/braulio94/menu_flutter
- porker 9y ago> (Disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.) Please, that's a disclosure, not a disclaimer. Keep up the great work, I'm really excited by Flutter!
- hoodoof 9y agoIf you say you have a beautiful, powerful, fast, full featured application development system then you need to be able to SHOW me, and its gotta knock me out in every possible way. Nothing here at all for Flutter, just words.
- sever 9y agoI think Newsvoice (https://newsvoice.com/app https://newsvoice.com/app) is written in flutter.
- suprfnk 9y agoWell, Flutter has been at beta 1 for just over a week now. https://medium.com/flutter-io/announcing-flutter-beta-1-build-beautiful-native-apps-dc142aea74c0 https://medium.com/flutter-io/announcing-flutter-beta-1-buil... I can imagine they haven't had the time to flesh out docs yet.
- VeryVito 9y agoHonestly, the best way to see the advantages of the toolset is to complete the "Get started" section of flutter.io. I develop iOS, Android, Web and Mac apps, and I was honestly blown away by the quality of the intelliJ and VSCode plugins available for Flutter. In fact, they've kinda ruined me for other language SDKs now. Granted, the lack of material, demos and discussions makes it difficult to tackle some problems, but that seems to be changing these days. It's hard NOT to enjoy coding in Flutter, though, and I think that end up being its biggest strength.
- cutler 9y ago"Dart feels like Java". Great. Now we can have D2EE on the client and server.
- hoodoof 9y agoWhere is that quote from? Is it praise or criticism?
- grzm 9y agoIt's from a bullet point in the article. The full quote is > "Dart feels like Java — making it easy for many developers to jump in"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- resource0x 9y agoBased on my own experience, it doesn't feel like java at all. It is very easy to learn for those who know java, or javascript, or C# etc - that's true. But the "look and feel" is different. And it's not only the language - libraries (e.g. collections) are very well designed. Just try it out- you will like it. As for flutter - there are novel, original ideas in there. It's not a copy of something else.
- bschwindHN 9y agoMaybe "feels like" is too subjective but it absolutely feels like Java to me: * Object-oriented with inheritance (sharing the same keywords such as 'class' and 'extends' * Non-optional semicolons * Constructors, method overriding, calling `super.whatever` in your overriden methods * Presence of null * A base Object class for all objects in Dart, with hashCode() toString() methods These are mostly superficial observations, and it's not a criticism of the language, but it certainly feels like Java to me, more than Scala or Go does.
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- biocomputation 9y agoAlso, where is the Flutter + GCE engine example? That's what interests me.
- degenerate 9y agoAgree, the examples need to be useful, practical ones that fetch stuff from GCE after user input.
- Harimwakairi 9y agoCan you give a little more detail about what you'd like to see? What would the ideal example look like for you?
- biocomputation 9y ago* I'd like to see an example of a single page app ( todo list or similar ) made with Flutter running on Google cloud hardware. * Ideally this app would be designed for a desktop browser. * I'd like to see examples of how to gracefully render this app on a mobile device. * I'd like to see how to do the UI in a really data-driven way so that I supply something like JSON and the UI just renders.
- cjoelrun 9y agoFlutter doesn't do what I feel React Native does best, rendering down to native components for Android and iOS (also web/tvOS). Flutter seems to render to custom view components so for better or worse your apps will probably look the same on all platforms. It's interesting to see what projects Google is using Flutter though, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia
- cageface 9y agoIn theory React Native delegates things to the native platform widgets but in fact a ton of RN components don't really do this. They use the platform's native UIView/View class but not the higher level controls in a lot of cases. Navigation in particular is kind of a mess in RN and diverges from the built-in mechanisms on Android and iOS significantly.
- zerr 9y agoBesides, even native apps (made with iOS or Android SDK) try to look as different as possible with custom made styles. So there is really no "native look" on mobile platforms.
- cageface 9y agoYeah that's true. For better or worse, designers try to make their mark by coming up with very distinctive designs that all too often throw affordance and usability out the window. Mobile UX is in a pretty bad place overall right now. Watching my parents struggle to do basic things on an iPad has been a good reality check for me in this regard.
- bsimpson 9y agoOne of the legacies of the successes of Flash and the web is that brands are pushing for an aesthetic that feels like their own. On the desktop, most Mac apps looked like most other Mac apps. On the web, authors often created their own components, and could completely customize their look. Mobile has largely tacked towards the web, where Airbnb looks more like Airbnb than it does like any other Android or iOS app.
- nzoschke 9y agoVery nice. I’ve been working on Lambda apps in Golang too. Here’s a boilerplate app that can help you get started and understand the pieces: https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas
- nevi-me 9y agoFlutter seems attractive, but the large build sizes are a showstopper for me sadly. I hope they're able to improve this in future.
- tomatsu 9y agoA release build of an Hello World app is around 7 MB.
- thrownaway954 9y agoso... is that good or bad?
- edf13 9y agoBad - on the very bad side of things
- sever 9y agoWhy is that a problem? Phones have gigs of space.
- pritambaral 9y agoNot all phones. And not that many gigs. And not all mobile networks have so much data bandwidth. At least not where I am.
- sever 9y agoAh, I see. Well, FWIW it starts at 7 MB, and then I presume grows at the same rate as a native app as it gets more complicated.
- tomatsu 9y agoYea, it's not a problem. Even more so if you can install apps onto SD cards. There is lots of room on my 32 GB card. I could literally install thousands of simple Flutter apps.
- jeanlucas 9y agoNo one here even mentions Firebase, why?
- bastawhiz 9y agoFirebase gets expensive very quickly. And the interface it provides is unfriendly to certain types of operations. In my own experience, I've never kept an app on Firebase longer than it took to prototype the app.
- jeanlucas 9y agoI don't see the expensive part, just some rumors, but never happened to me. But I agree it's not that easy to use.
- faitswulff 9y agoFrom what I can tell, Firebase Database and Functions are great. However, I used Expo and Firebase Storage for a React Native app I made for my wedding and they left a bad taste in my mouth. No file blob support in Expo (I know it's coming) meant that I had to base64 encode the file and send it up to a Firebase Function, which then stored it in Firebase Storage. I thought it was over then, but it turns out you can't list the contents of a Firebase Storage bucket without the exact key to the file. The recommendation was to store that in Firebase Database when you persist the file. So I spent another 2 hours the day after my wedding scraping my images from Firebase Storage. I ended up wasting days on what should have been simple photo upload functionality. Granted, I could have avoided Expo or ejected the project, but at the time I wanted to stay on the Expo platform. I'm just surprised that Firebase Storage lacks basic functionality like listing the contents of a folder. It would also have been nice if it accepted base64 encoded files, to avoid having to use a Firebase Function to do the conversion. TL;DR - tried Firebase for a mobile app recently, it was equal parts "wow, this is cool" and "wow, this is stupid"
- CodeSheikh 9y agoNice and very concise tutorial but it generously missed the entire AWS Lambda section (and how much pain it is to work with, IAM setup, API gateway setup, SDK support etc etc). Perhaps the author wanted the focus to be on Flutter and less on backend (AWS Lambda in this scenario).
- nickbeukema 9y agoCurious of the community's opinion on this article that was sent to me today on "Worst Programming Languages to Learn in 2018", with Dart being the #1. In light of Flutter gaining some ground, would anyone think it would push back at this conclusion? https://www.codementor.io/blog/worst-languages-to-learn-3phycr98zk https://www.codementor.io/blog/worst-languages-to-learn-3phy...
- resource0x 9y agoMy speculation is that those who marked it "the worst language to learn" never actually tried it, and based their opinions on something they heard 3-5 years ago. But now the dart is different and its goals are different. In any case, I believe this kind of negative opinion is grossly unfair.
- luhn 9y agoThey based it off 3 metrics: Community, Growth, and Job Market. I'm not surprised Dart is on the list. As good as the language may be, it remains a fairly niche.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]