Flutter & Dart

This section outlines my initial cross-platform deployment plan - using Flutter / Dart. However, given that I lacked the fundamentals of Javascript & HTML/CSS, this app was not scalable.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source UI framework developed by Google that allows developers to build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase, using the Dart programming language.

Final thoughts

To adjust the priority of learning Dart programming language, it seems plausible to summarise the pros and cons of learning and usability in future projects.

• Pros

  • Cross-Platform Development: With Flutter, developers write one codebase and can deploy it on multiple platforms like iOS, Android, and the web. This reduces development time and effort

  • Performance: Since Flutter compiles to native code (using Dart), it offers high performance and smooth animations, making it suitable for creating complex apps.

  • Points experienced by myself while building apps:

    • The widgets automatically scales to the device or window size (unlike CSS).

• Cons

  • Returning to the beginner phase: Requires you to learn a new language with limited community support. This also means that current pattern designs are still at trialing / testing phase and requires you to play around with it more than other frontend languages to learn the programming tricks.

  • Points experienced by myself while building apps:

    • Takes time re-compiling applications which can be quite frustrating while tinkering with widgets.

    • Limited Libraries and Tools: given that it is a fairly new community, less contributions compared to other programming languages.

    • Still unsure to the performance overhead in application. Based on my experience, programming complex animations with JavaScript tends to be slower during production than in the pre-deployment phase.