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Flutter summer project

As a summer project, I helped out a team at my local university in a project combining open data with students seeking an apartment to rent, especially when moving to a new city. They designed a mobile app for this task, and I was to implement it.

I decided to try out Flutter this time instead of react-native.

Again, there are several blog posts and even official documentation on how to transform from native or react-native development into using Flutter.  Here are my two cents though

Dart. Google's solution for building UI:s. The syntax is familiar looking. I like the way how it is not limited to any particular form of programming, but the guideline for Flutter enforces a specific declarative style. One of the best parts of Flutter development is the named arguments.

Development environment. One of the better setup experiences. A self-contained diagnostic tool which alerts if something is not set correctly. Updating is a simple git pull and some installation scripts. I had no trouble in running the application in either IOS and Android simulators.

Flutter library. Out of the box, Flutter contains all the necessary UI elements (with Material design) for your simple Todo app. The elements or widgets in Flutter terms are split into stateless and stateful. The stateful ones have a well thought, although a bit verbose, manner of separating the state from the UI logic in a declarative way.

Testing. I only wrote plain old unit tests for the business logic and some UI tests using the flutter_test framework. I would say it is on par with react-native testing. I have yet to see a unit test framework for UI components which would work intuitively, and while Flutter certainly worked ok, I had some problems with gestures.

If I had to choose between Flutter and react-native, I would undoubtedly choose the former, especially if new to mobile development.  Main reasons are, in my opinion better, typed, UI widgets, better development environment (including an excellent vscode plugin) and an overall faster and snappier app as a result.

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