This week in Flutter #3

🧑‍💻 Development

AngularDart will soon enter maintenance mode

The Dart team announced that they will soon release a stable external release of AngularDart with null safety, and then the project will only be maintained and not actively developed anymore. The reason is that the team will push Flutter for web more. More news at the Google I/O event.

Cleaner Flutter Vol. 7: Where the data comes from

Do you want to make your app data layer better? Then read this article from Marcos Sevilla, it is part of a series, so go read also the previous ones.

Run Flutter apps in multiple platforms parallelly.

I always run my apps in debug mode from the command line. I am an old-school developer. If you use Visual Studio Code, but I imagine it will be similar for other IDEs, you can debug your app easily from the editor itself. Minnu shows us how to run your app on multiple platforms simultaneously.

🧑‍🎨 Design

WhatsApp Clone (Backend & FrontEnd)

Balram Rathore is working on an amazing recreation of WhatsApp made in Flutter. With videos explaining the process. Available on GitHub and on YouTube.

🗄 Backend

Automatically publish a Flutter Web App on GitHub Pages

You can deploy your Flutter web app to Google Cloud, Amazon Web Service, or any other infrastructure as a service solution. But you can also just host it as a GitHub Pages website. See how in this article by Jan Mewes.

🤷‍♂️ Others

Q1 2021 user survey results

The Flutter team released the survey results about the reasons why developers adopt Flutter. I am not surprised by the first reason: a single codebase. In my experience, this is the main reason Flutter is chosen for clients' projects. Being able to make a single offer for both the Android and the iOS version of an app, which is lower than the combined offers for two distinct apps, is what resonates more with potential clients. I am surprised to see “vision to expand to web and desktop” not at the second place. That is also a big selling point with the client: the possibility to provide a browser version of their app in the future, or even a desktop version (with a limited budget), helps selling Flutter even more.

Flutter development using Vim

Some developers hate it, many love it. Vim is used effectively for development for years. Robert Brunhage shows us how to increase your productivity when using Vim while developing in Flutter. Check also a more generic article about using Vim. Oh, and he is a Flutter & Dart Google Developer Expert with a very active YouTube channel, so go have a look.

That’s it for this week.

If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.

Have a bug-free week,

- Michele Volpato