Overview 🔗
The project I am working on is the Forest Wellness Checkup App, which is a cross platform mobile app designed to aid forestry professionals in the field. At the time of this writing we are about half way into the capstone course however we are only just finished in the second week of development. As such, our team has not yet gotten into the nitty gritty of all the other technologies we will use for our project including libraries for PDF manipulation, DOCX manipulation, stylus control, and digital ink recognition. In contrast, we have been very involved in the initial layout of the mobile and getting more and more familiar with the Flutter and Dart SDKs. There have been some pain points (mainly learning curve) but so far the Flutter/Dart SDKs have been my favorite technology mainly due to three things: Flutter’s built-in widgets, cross platform development, and developer experience. Personally I believe the pros outweigh the cons for this project.
Learning Curve 🔗
First, lets start with the bad: outside of Flutter, Dart is rarely seen in the wild. For this reason there is a high chance that if a developer has not worked on a Flutter app, said developer probably is not familiar with Dart. This leads to the inevitable challenge that is simultaneously learning a new language and as well as a framework which can be a tall order. Our team,of course, had to take some time to work through this during our first week of development. Despite both my team members having no prior experience with Dart, they were both able to get up to speed due to its similarities with other languages. Flutter, on the other hand has been, a bit more challenging in that layouts are a bit different than what one is used to when developing for web.
Built-in Widgets 🔗
However, this is where the benefits start coming in handy namely the declarative widget system that Flutter employs. There are a myriad of widgets to do nearly any layout task we can imagine. Further if there are layouts that they do no exactly cover we can create our own through composition. This has been great to avoid re-inventing the wheel for many common layouts we needed for our app. Moreover the built-in widgets are documented in great detail at flutter.dev in addition to videos on many common widgets as well as cookbooks for frequently used tasks. In regards to styling, these widgets do not need a separate language (like CSS for React) which allows a single language for layout, styling, and logic.
Cross Platform 🔗
Another benefit that helps mitigate the time sink into the learning curve is the fact that Flutter is inherently cross platform. As Flutter can build apps for Android, iOS, web, Desktop we can just keep a single codebase for the entire project. Comparing this to Native apps where we would need both Kotlin and Swift this reduces the amount of work we have to do as a mere three person team. Unfortunately one limitation here is that to build/test iOS apps one must still use Xcode and hence have access to a macOS device or appropriate virtualization tools.
Developer Experience 🔗
Finally, Flutter toolchain makes the developer experience very pleasant. Since the Dart SDK comes bundled with linter (dart analyze), formatter (dart format), and even language server (one less thing to install for Emacs and Vim users) just having the Dart SDK provides quite a few development tools out of the box. This saves developers new to the framework from having to hunt down and install these tools. Further, the language server provides access to another useful development tool dart fix so when developing, ones editor/IDE can make suggestions and even perform refactoring based off the results of the linter. For example if one wanted to change a widget from stateless to stateful, one need only consult their editor/IDE and choose the appropriate “code action” instead of rewriting the entire class by hand (which would be more error prone). Other code actions work directly on the widget tree by wrapping widgets, removing them, or even extracting them to separate variables/methods/classes. In addition to the aforementioned tools there are also Flutter specific tools like hot reload/start (saves a huge amount of time instead of recompiling each time) and the Flutter dev tools (widget inspector, profiler, and friends) that provide even more help out of the box.
Closing Remarks 🔗
Despite the initial learning curve I believe that the Flutter/Dart SDK is the right choice for this project. It saves a huge amount of time being cross platform but also makes the process of actually writing the app pleasant and quick as well. This app does not need a large number of esoteric features so I think the more mature ecosystem of a framework like React Native is unwarranted. I’m happy with Flutter and Dart so far.