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I was the biggest advocate of this approach. Then, by chance I landed flutter/dart side project. The power of language where you can mix business logic in pre

I was the biggest advocate of this approach. Then, by chance I landed flutter/dart side project. The power of language where you can mix business logic in presentation files is awesome. You can include your own or 3rd party clients and get full autocomplete and type safety. The styling did feel awkward at first, but even I, being the first time developer managed to create pixel perfect replica of whatever crazy widget style our designer came up with. And using cols/rows made it easy to make app look good on variety of screen sizes. I hope that in some moment in time we get same experience for the web, and I encourage more people to try flutter/dart, you migh be pleasantly surprised.

mdpm 6y ago
Strong IDE support is a feature of a vendor language? Not surprised. The web has a few good IDEs too, but as you're free to use your own compilers, linker, dependency management, etc., it's a little tougher to do this with.
k__ 6y ago
While I personally think Flutter is a mess, shouldn't it be easy to port it to the web? Dart was created as a JS replacement and for a time the Dart to JS compiler emitted code that was more performant than vanilla JS.
- neya 6y ago
  As someone who is just beginning to learn Flutter, I am interested to know why you think it's a mess. I've been a full stack engineer with a focus on backend for a while now and was just getting my feet wet with app development with Flutter. Is there something else better than Flutter I can give a shot? Thanks (in advance) for your advice.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Don't think there is a real alternative. I personally prefer React-Native, but only because I know JavaScript and think flexbox is a really clean solution for mobile layouts. Flutter draws its UIs in a custom way, which is the exact opposite approach that React-Native takes.
DanBC 6y ago
> pixel perfect replica How do you know your users have pixels and not, for example, screen readers?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Modern development is all about ignoring edge cases. If the analytics say that only 1% of users use something, they shave that functionality off. A natural consequence is that disabled users are ignored.
poisonborz 6y ago
But that side project was an app, I presume? The web is not an application platform per se. Web content should be rendered as transparently and accessibly as possible. Just imagine a world where you can't use browser extensions, screen readers, even text selection... To note, you can use flutter/dart and just have a web output (which works still fairly bad tho, last I checked).
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  "native apps" can be used with screen readers, and you can select text with them?????
  - lukevp 6y ago
    Flutter uses a canvas rendering strategy where it’s painting all controls itself, so it’s not “native” in that it’s using controls from the OS, and therefore all a11y and select functionality is implemented custom.
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      Ahh. So its a bad app/framework then.
  - Grumbledour 6y ago
    That really depends heavily on the platform and specific app. It is not there by default for most. Using canvas based rendering is pretty much as accessible as flash apps where, which is not much by default.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  > The web is not an application platform per se. It may not have been envisioned as one, but it certainly _is_ an application platform today. It's arguably the most popular most accessible application platform today.

mdpm 6y ago

Strong IDE support is a feature of a vendor language? Not surprised. The web has a few good IDEs too, but as you're free to use your own compilers, linker, dependency management, etc., it's a little tougher to do this with.

k__ 6y ago

While I personally think Flutter is a mess, shouldn't it be easy to port it to the web? Dart was created as a JS replacement and for a time the Dart to JS compiler emitted code that was more performant than vanilla JS.

neya 6y ago
As someone who is just beginning to learn Flutter, I am interested to know why you think it's a mess. I've been a full stack engineer with a focus on backend for a while now and was just getting my feet wet with app development with Flutter. Is there something else better than Flutter I can give a shot? Thanks (in advance) for your advice.
- k__ 6y ago
  Don't think there is a real alternative. I personally prefer React-Native, but only because I know JavaScript and think flexbox is a really clean solution for mobile layouts. Flutter draws its UIs in a custom way, which is the exact opposite approach that React-Native takes.

DanBC 6y ago

> pixel perfect replica How do you know your users have pixels and not, for example, screen readers?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Modern development is all about ignoring edge cases. If the analytics say that only 1% of users use something, they shave that functionality off. A natural consequence is that disabled users are ignored.

poisonborz 6y ago

But that side project was an app, I presume? The web is not an application platform per se. Web content should be rendered as transparently and accessibly as possible. Just imagine a world where you can't use browser extensions, screen readers, even text selection... To note, you can use flutter/dart and just have a web output (which works still fairly bad tho, last I checked).

madeofpalk 6y ago
"native apps" can be used with screen readers, and you can select text with them?????
- lukevp 6y ago
  Flutter uses a canvas rendering strategy where it’s painting all controls itself, so it’s not “native” in that it’s using controls from the OS, and therefore all a11y and select functionality is implemented custom.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    Ahh. So its a bad app/framework then.
- Grumbledour 6y ago
  That really depends heavily on the platform and specific app. It is not there by default for most. Using canvas based rendering is pretty much as accessible as flash apps where, which is not much by default.
zeroxfe 6y ago
> The web is not an application platform per se. It may not have been envisioned as one, but it certainly _is_ an application platform today. It's arguably the most popular most accessible application platform today.