Testing out Flutter

It was hack-a-thon days at work so I decided to try Flutter. I found a blank starter app then spent 10 Google Searches to about every two lines of code I actually wrote it seemed like. Flutter and Dart have both been evolving so much that a number of searches showed old information. At least most of the Stack Overflow stuff pointed you to the newer way of doing things.

For the past two years I have been doing Kotlin so I kept forgetting to add ; to the end of lines. Already know the IDE but I did not want to pollute Android Studio so I grabbed IntelliJ and set up under that. Configuration was pretty straight forward and since I am on a MacBook I could test both iOS and Android builds. Did all the work on Android emulator then tried it on iOS from time to time.

I used the Material look and I have zero if / then checks for Android or iOS. Small app so that does not prove a lot but for what I did I ran into no issues.

App has an image, read from assets, and 6 buttons with icons from the Icons package and text in a grid layout to go to other areas. One button shows an Alert Dialog. One goes to a screen with a ListView. The ListView is populated with items I read from a JSON file in the assets area.

I learned about Row, Column, Container, ListView, TextStyle, Expanded and all sorts of Widget properties. I have used a lot of layout managers over the years so I was able to get up to speed pretty quickly but I did a lot of searches to find what I needed and I refactored the layout code at least 6 times. Lots of indenting and easy to screw up a ( ) and [ ] matches or miss the ; at the end. The errors given by IDE generally pretty good.

Imported Intl, DateFormat and Decimal. Wrote converters for JSON as I have Date Time and Decimal needs due to Double having accuracy issues. Learned how to grab a file from assets. I did not mess with any network stuff as you need to login with OAuth first to get to any of our data and that seems like it would eat up both days.

Felt like I got a lot done in a day and a half. Very frustrating at first as getting anything simple to work took a lot of web searching and I went down so many wrong paths. First I was setting up the icon buttons as decorated columns then found I should be using FlatButton instead so I could get the actually tapped event and the tapped visual effects. Initial ListView code I found was very complicated but I found a simpler version and got it running quickly.

So am I a Flutter convert? No, I just wanted to see what it is all about. We use a number of 3rd parties for interaction with Credit Card readers and what not that probably would be a massive pain to deal with in Flutter. I was impressed at the speed of testing stuff in my small two screen app. The instant run is nice. Having an identical app on two platforms is sweet. Setting up images sucked as you have to manually add them into the YAML file. I just want all things in a directory to be there. On-line help is all over the place, some old, some new, some expecting you to know a lot especially when they talk about packages. They don't always mention what to add to your YAML so you do another search to find out that info.

Do I see some usages here? Kinda, like any app that appears to start out small you go "oh, I could do this simple app and get a free iOS version" but then you start adding more and more stuff then you hit some wall where you need something deeper in hardware and you are screwed.

Next areas would be doing actual REST calls, doing complicated UI work, SQLite interaction, lifecycle fun, shared preferences, animations, and basically being a real full featured app.

Glad I had time to play with it as was paid to do it. Time to save the code to Git and move back into my Kotlin reality. Worry is when I demo it this afternoon that the big bosses will think I found the holy grail of coding. Setting expectations is the key here.