This week in Flutter #62: Awesome open source packages

This week I learned about PlutoGrid. I worked on a Flutter-based CMS some months ago, and we had to adapt an existing package to get a data grid working for us. PlutoGrid seems to be what we needed from the start.

And this is what I love about the Flutter community. There are plenty of awesome projects out there, you just need to find them. PlutoGrid is a project maintained by Manki Kim.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Quick assists for editing

Learn more about Dart’s quick assists: automated edits that aim at making changes that are common while coding. By Brian Wilkerson from the Dart team.

Backend 🗄

🔗 A fast, minimalistic backend framework for Dart 🎯

Very Good Ventures is working on a backend framework built on top of shelf and mason. It is still an experiment, but we all hope it will grow into a full feature framework.

Tools 🛠

🔗 Announcing Zapp, an in browser sandbox environment to build Flutter apps

This is an interesting new tool from Invertase. It looks like using Visual Studio Code but in your browser. It still has some limitations, but it can be used to create a quick prototype from any computer, without the need to install Flutter. Read the article written by Majid Hajian.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 Synchronous BuildContexts | Decoding Flutter

Is it safe to asynchronously use the BuildContext in the build method? Should you always check if the widget is mounted? Tiya Chowdhury explains the new use_build_context_synchronously lint rule.

🔗 Full-stack Dart with Simon Lightfoot: Pt 2 (The Boring Flutter Development Show, Ep. 60)

This is the second part of The Boring Flutter Development Show started three weeks ago. Watch the first part here. Craig Labenz and Simon Lightfoot continues to talk about full-stack Dart, using Flutter and server-side Dart.

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