This week in Flutter #48: Vote for your favorite Flutter Puzzle.

2 April 2022

The Flutter Puzzle Hack projects have been submitted. You can try them and even vote for your favorite. I like this one by Rene Floor, but I might be a bit biased. Rene is an organizer of the Flutter Netherlands meetup. He gave a short presentation about it during the latest meetup last week.

Did you submit any projects? Did you vote for any of the submitted ones? Let me know in the comment section below.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 How to create an object with firestore’s auto-generated uid as property from document snapshot

When you create a Firebase Firestore object from a Flutter app without assigning an id on creation, Firestore will auto-assign an id for you. But how do you add that id to the model objects in the app? Yuri provides you with a simple trick in this article.

🔗 Improve the performance of Flutter-Web App

One of the most successful Flutter apps I work on daily is available on both mobile and web. We haven’t noticed any serious performance issue. Of course, it is less performant than a proper web app, built specifically for the web. Performance might not be the same for all developers, so, in this article, Manu KJ gives some tips on improving the performance of a Flutter web app.

All the new Flutter projects my team and I work on are using go_router by default. A colleague of mine gave a short talk about it last week, during our biweekly tech meeting. It is much better than using your own Navigation 2.0 implementation. In this article, Andrea Bizzotto explains the difference between going to a route and pushing a route.

🔗 How I added animation to my generated Flutter website using Parabeac

Last week I linked an article about creating a portfolio website using Flutter, Parabeac, and Figma. This week Ivan Vigliante shows us how to include animations in the mix.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Flutter – Calling a Google Cloud Function

I often use Firebase as the backend for Flutter apps. Firebase is part of Google, and most of the tools Firebase provides are also available directly in Google Cloud. You can also skip the middleman and use Google’s resources directly if you like. One example Bart van Wezel gives in this article is that you might want to write your Cloud Functions in a language that is not supported by Firebase.

🔗 Firebase Authentication with a custom Dart Server Application

My strong belief is that you should never implement authentication on your own in your server. There are so many hidden issues you do not know about. So when I read about integrating an existing service like Firebase Authentication into your own server I get very interested. In this article, Warren Strange explains how to do it with a Dart server.

Tools 🛠

🔗 Use Alchemist to simplify your Flutter Goldens

Get started with 🧙🏼 Alchemist for better golden tests with this tutorial by Guillaume Bernos.

Others 🤷‍♂️

New episode of Widget of the Week. The example the Flutter team uses to explain it is a bit weird. What happens if I add another widget to the Column that uses isExpanded? It will not get updated when isExpanded changes. So what is the point of having isExpanded outside of the InexpensiveStateful widget? I am not the only one with such doubts. What do you think?

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,